Year end: AIR and RIAs raise Adobe's profile

In the engineering industry, you can be pretty certain you've hit the large clip when Microsoft develops a merchandise specifically
to vie with you.

That's the place Adobe Systems establish itself in this year, when Microsoft developed a to equal Adobe's Flash, the Delaware facto criterion for developing and delivering picture and multimedia system content on the Web.

Adobe is exiting the twelvemonth not only as the company of pick for originative people everywhere, but as an influential force
to be reckoned with and a powerfulness participant alongside Apple and Google, the companies leading the consumer-savvy, multimedia-friendly
Internet moving ridge of Web 2.0.

Over its 25 years, Adobe -- a company known less for its dazzle than its dependableness -- have got quietly turned itself into a
multibillion-dollar software seller on the strength of engineerings that have go indispensable to computing machine users. Creative
people would be lost without the graphic-design tools Photoshop and Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat and PDF have got made
it easy for everyone to share written documents cross-platform.

But with its two old age ago, Adobe also took on another function -- as innovator of providing a next-generation platform for developing rich
Internet applications. RIAs, as they're called, supply more than than intuitive and multimedia-rich user experiences on the Web than
typical client/server Oregon desktop applications, and are now in high demand as users anticipate more from their multimedia system Web experiences
with the rise in popularity of land sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Still, though the proud proprietor of PDF and Flash, two of the most omnipresent engineerings in the history of desktop computers,
Adobe have got never enjoyed the same powerful trade name acknowledgment as coevals that have also built widely used technology. While Google's hunt engine inspired the improver of the word "google" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Adobe's technologies
have got always spoken louder than the company's name itself.

"Adobe is not a existent sexy brand," acknowledged Keith Cutcliffe, a professional Web interior designer and developer who utilizes the company's
software.

Indeed, Antony Franco, president of Denver-based application designing and development house EffectiveUI, said his company leads
client battles by talking about the Flash Player, not necessarily Adobe itself, because the engineering is so well known. "It's the trade name acknowledgment of the Flash Player first, then we link the dots," he said.

But that have begun to change. Adobe took complaint of the Macromedia acquisition this year, eliminating that company's brand
and merging its ain long-popular artwork tools with Web-design tools acquired from Macromedia, such as as Dreamweaver and the
aforesaid Flash, into Creative Suite 3. Continued1 | | | »