Microsoft and Adobe released two significant products this week, accompanied by a peculiarly low-key publicity campaign. And it’s puzzling why.
Microsoft released its Expression Studio in Canada at the same time Adobe released something called Digital Editions. Both software packages promise to be important, if only as weapons in what many people have called a war between the software giants. And that’s why it’s mystifying that neither company has wrapped the launch in the usual aggressive and threatening language that suggests the product will bury the competition — especially Microsoft, which has never shied away from rapacious rhetoric.
Expression Studio is a suite of programs for professional website developers, and involves a strong web-page development tool called Expression Web; a page-design tool called Expression Design, a media-conversion tool called Expression Media and a truly interesting image editor called Expression Blend, which handles both raster and vector graphics.
This last program appears to be a combination a clever combination of two products that Adobe has wrapped up as a market leader: Photoshop and Illustrator. Microsoft decided to blend the two by having a program that allows users to put vector graphics and pixel images on separate layers in the same image, and to collapse them together when they’re done.
This strikes me as a revolutionary concept. And one that could be interpreted as a direct attack on two of Adobe’s major products.
Moreover, this comes just weeks after Microsoft announced the release of Silverlight, a browser plug-in that creates rich Internet applications, such as large animation files, to be show on the Web, like Adobe’s Flash. And that has led web pundits to speculate Silverlight is a “Flash killer.”
And Expression is heavily integrated into Silverlight. And lest we forget, Macromedia. which created Flash, had developed a sophisticated rich Internet applications before Adobe bought the company a few years ago, and Adobe is still running with that strategy.
Moreover, the really big fight these days is centred on using Flash in mobile devices, such as PDAs and cellphones, another area where Adobe and Microsoft conflict.
For its part, Adobe announced a product called Digital Editions, a completely new products designed to acquire, manage and read e-books, digital newspapers and other digital publications. It’s being released as a free download for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems. Adobe is promoting the software as one that will transform the digital reading experience and offer new creative possibilities for publishers.
Digital Editions is more than another e-book reader, a product that died when both Adobe and Microsoft — as well as a lot of other software manufacturers — produced their own versions a few years back. DE works with Adobe’s InDesign CS3 to allow publishers to create new content, not just already published books, promising to cut publication costs dramatically. Sony, in fact, has already said it would embed the technology into its portable reader product line.
With Digital Editions, content automatically adapts to different screen sizes; it also supports Flash software, a better integration of rich audio and video.
Put it all together, and it looks like Adobe and Microsoft are on a collision course.
So where is the hype? The belligerence?
