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Friday, October 13, 2006

Scoble on Adobe vs. Microsoft death match

Scoble posted his analysis on Adobe and Microsoft entering a death match. He completely misses Flex, but indirectly refers to Apollo:
I was over at Adobe yesterday and they have some major things coming next year that’ll play off of Adobe’s strengths and take the battle back to Redmond.
I am glad to see the attention this is getting. It will certainly help in promoting Flex even further. As a response to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 vs. Dreamweaver page, Adobe should put out just as detailed comparion between Flex/Apollo and Visual Studio, just to say "yes, we're here for a hardcore battle".

Update:
I went on to search what other people are saying on this subject. I noticed JD's post and honestly was surprised by his take on it. JD, I think it is absolutely a coming war. Developers have always been the cornerstone of Microsoft's strategy. Any Microsoft's product release is touted to developers first. Adobe is encroaching into Microsoft's territory; otherwise you would not see that VS vs. DW comparison. Obviously you do not speak for the entire Adobe, but your comment makes me realize that the overall view within Adobe on the forming battle field is different, sounds like you want to see it a peaceful place. This clearly explains why Adobe is so exclusively fascinated with Java. I hope the realization comes fairly soon that the more developers you get on board the bigger prize you are going to get.

4 Comments:

Anonymous John Dowdell said...

I see Adobe and Microsoft competing in certain areas, cooperating in certain areas.

Robert's writing was loose enough so that you couldn't tell who was talking. He said he visited Adobe and then spouted all this "total war" stuff, but did not take ownership of his own opinion.

7:40 AM

 
Blogger Mark Piller said...

Do you think Adobe and MS will be fighting for the same developers? Will you be cooperating with WPF or competing against it? If the latter, I'd assume you'd want the people creating next generation online experiences to use your technology. As history shows, any time anyone tries to get MS developers away from the MS technology (NS vs, IE, Java vs .NET, etc) Microsoft does not let it go easily. I predict the same is going to happen with Flex/Apollo vs. WPE/.NET/ASP.

8:07 AM

 
Anonymous John Dowdell said...

"Do you think Adobe and MS will be fighting for the same developers?"

In some cases, people will be making decisions among technologies, sure... has been happening for awhile.

"Will you be cooperating with WPF or competing against it?"

Me, I don't think I'll have much personal role in Windows Presentation Framework either way. For the company, I don't recall seeing any announcements either way yet... odds would probably be stronger for any word after it's finalized and actually shipping.

(I had two main concerns with Robert's post: it wasn't clear that those were his words and not Adobe's; and looking at Adobe's upcoming work solely through a Microsoft prism seems like it would miss a whole lot of what's really being improved here. The concept of "total war" is still strange to me... you're seeing lots of Microsoft workgroups choosing to use SWF now, for instance, which wouldn't be the case were the situation as dire and constrained as all that.)

jd

11:15 AM

 
Anonymous Mike said...

Visual Studio is a great IDE, Flex/Flash is a great RIA Cross platform solution.

Programming FLEX with Eclipse after working with Visual Studio is a real pain since Eclipse is so far behind VS.

If Microsoft really wanted to compete here they need to get dotnet running on the mac and linux as both a browser plugin and an app.

If Adobe wants to compete they need to take a good look at Visual Studio as an IDE as Eclipse just doesnt cut it.

Right now in the RIA areana, things are much better but still a mess. Flex for the heavy lifting and cross browser script for the lighter stuff.

11:15 AM

 

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