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Against Apple, Ballmer Floats Microsoft Merger With Adobe
Ebbesen writes "Ballmer had a meeting with the CEO of Adobe, and among other things: 'The meeting, which lasted over an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could partner in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.' Apparently MS has courted Adobe previously, but feared anti-trust regulations. With Google and Apple gaining, Microdobe might be possible."
I know we all hate Flash, but we need it (sometimes) and I doubt Microbe would continue development on Flash for Linux.
Microsoft has replaced postscript with XPS. IE and Silverlight can display XPS, so goodbye Acrobat. Silverlight does video and RIA. Goodbye Flash. Expression Blend can do what Illustrator does, although it's not as mature.
And with no one giving MS a chance of succeeding in the mobile space, the time may be right to sidestep antitrust issues.
Microsoft gets a migration path from Adobe to Silverlight. Adobe shareholders get $$$'s and not uncertainty.
The uncertainty will come from the government.
There wouldn't be any name change for Microsoft - the brand is far too valuable. Adobe would cease to exist; or rather they would become a subsidiary and only funnel money to Microsoft.
They have very few competing products, which is great for the customers of both. There would be far more integration, very little product loss.
It would be great to see Flash take on some of Silverlight's power and ease of development. Combining the best of the two would create a very worthy foe. Coldfusion has long had a few features that ASP should have had. FrameMaker could lend a hand to Word, and Visio could become an addin to FrameMaker...as all three are used very much when writing technical books.
After the scare Adobe received earlier this year at the hands of Apple, Adobe must realize at any time Apple holds the power in their relationship. Although Adobe is responsible for Apple's early dominance in the graphic and motion industry, Apple no longer needs them. In terms of sales, Adobe has always made most of their money supporting Microsoft's operating system.
Lately both companies have seen innovation only in the form of acquisitions of smaller, more nimble companies. Whatever they choose, they need to do it before the slide starts.
Well, that merger would spell the death of Flash pretty damn quickly. What, you think Microsoft would keep Flash _and_ Silverlight? You think they'd keep Flash _instead_ of Silverlight? Don't kid yourself - they are a corporate culture company with political infighting of the worst degree. The Microsoft team would do everything and then some to ensure that all products that Adobe made that duplicated existing Microsoft products were wiped from the face of computing. If they're willing to nonchallantly stab fellow Microsoft execs in the back to ensure their product gets favoured treatment, just think how ruthless they'll be against non-Microsoft execs...
Halo originally wasn't ever intended to be an XBox game. Back in those days, Bungie was a Mac-only game company.
Then Bungie publicly showed a demo of an early alpha version in action. M$ saw it and decided they wanted to have it as an exclusive for the new console they were developing.
To Mac users it was like Halo was stolen before it even left the womb.
XPS shows everything wrong with MS, even with a rival (!) like Adobe.
They come up with a "document" standard and yet they didn't even ship a viewer (let alone some virtual printer) for OS X. I am not even mentioning Linux support which is big deal on corporate. I don't want to cost anyone their job at that weirdo company so not giving any examples but it seems, they do create a lot of docs on OS X, export to PDF (or PS), re-export to XPS on a Windows machine/bot.
That is supposed to be Microsoft's answer to PDF. Just imagine if XPS really replaced PDF. It wouldn't be a nice day for anyone not using Windows on Desktop/Mobile. I am not even sure if there is an official XPS viewer for Windows 7 Mobile.
I got creative friends and imagine my surprise when I find out about "Expression" software, as I am not in that segment, I asked them and they -too- didn't have a clue about that software. They had a good laugh when they heard they are supposed to use "that thing" (their words) to do work for Silverlight. You know, in dream World of MS (and Ballmer), designers even use MS Visual Studio and OS X using designers install Eclipse to do Silverlight. Yea, right.