Microsoft is thought to have investigated buying Adobe some years ago, but abandoned the idea with the expectation of running into new antitrust problems. With Apple and Google now such strong competitors, such a purchase may now be a viable option. Regardless of the legal difficulties, a partnership—and, indeed, a Microsoft purchase—makes sense.

The common enemy

Apple’s increasing importance in the mobile space with its trio of iOS devices, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, is a growing threat to both companies. Adobe and Apple butt heads in a number of markets. The two companies have competing software (Adobe’s Lightroom and Premiere go up against Apple’s Aperture and Final Cut Studio, for example), and more significantly, Apple is attacking a key Adobe product: Flash.

IOS devices have no Flash support in their browsers, so can’t run Flash ads or any other Flash content on webpages. Apple has been advocating the use of HTML5, with its video and interactivity capabilities, as an alternative. Given the dominance of Flash in advertising, this is a big blow to Adobe. Apple then stepped up the pressure on Adobe with the launch earlier this year of iAds—rich, Flash-like ads built using HTML5.

Microsoft’s difficulties in the mobile space—both phones and tablets—are well-known. The tablet problem is probably more serious; though Microsoft would like to have a piece of the smartphone market, it’s tablets that threaten PC sales, and hence Windows. There is already some suggestion that iPad sales are denting netbook sales, and this is a trend that Microsoft could be badly hurt by. At the very least, it would substantially diminish home PC sales; ultimately, it could threaten corporate computer purchases too.

Apple’s anti-Flash stance also indirectly threatens Microsoft. Redmond’s relationship with HTML5 is a difficult one. On the one hand, the Internet Explorer team is making a considerable effort to make Internet Explorer 9 a modern browser with good support for new web technology. That team, at least, is serious about HTML5.

On the other hand, Microsoft is also investing in its own Flash competitor, Silverlight, which it introduced in 2007 with great fanfare. Like Flash, Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows the creation of rich, interactive web applications, and like Flash, it includes a range of media features not available to HTML5, such as DRM-protection of video streams. HTML5 threatens Silverlight in much the same way as it threatens Flash.

HTML5 also raises Microsoft’s long-standing fear about the web: that it would become a platform in its own right and displace the Windows PC. It is this fear that led to the development of Internet Explorer and the first browser war; Microsoft doesn’t want the web to be a platform, but if it must be one, it should be a Microsoft-powered web accessed through a Microsoft browser on a Microsoft operating system.

Microsoft and Adobe do compete on a number of fronts. Silverlight and Flash, and ASP.NET and ColdFusion, are the two main areas of opposition. However, in practice, even in these competitive areas, the companies’ respective products have carved out their own niches, and neither is threatening to completely demolish the other. Apple’s stance towards Flash—get rid of it, use HTML5—is far more dangerous to Flash, and far more vigorously pursued, than Microsoft’s stance—use this other browser plugin instead.

Having a common enemy isn’t enough to justify working together, of course. There needs to be some practical benefit to cooperation: something that strengthens both Microsoft and Adobe against the Apple threat.

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Authors: Peter Bright

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