Jay Palmer(2007, para. 22) notes that Adobe’s Acrobat Reader and Flash Player, which are both free software, outnumber combined install-base of Microsoft and Apple operating systems. This indicates that Adobe is very well penetrated in our desktop, more than either of the above software powerhouses.
Adobe makes money on the free software in an indirect way. Adobe sells tools that allows content-creation for these two products. Adobe Acrobat, which is used for PDF file creation provided 20% of Adobe’s revenue last year. Likewise, people buy Flash to create content for Flash Player.
Jay also notes that Adobe’s upcoming Apollo software is yet another feather in their cap as far as web technology is concerned. This software will allow users to use web technology in a more desktop-way; it will no longer be required to open a browser and navigate to a web-site to interact with web content. The data can be accessed, changed, added, deleted with enormous ease straight from the desktop.
Personally I think Adobe is not only the creator this niche market of productivity tools for the web, but also is “the” leading company in the market. Other companies in this market as Microsoft, RealNetworks or Google are way behind Adobe in both technology and market penetration. On the contrary, Google’s YouTube uses Flash to deliver content to web-consumers. It’s probably in Google’s interest to not use Flash for business reasons, however, it doesn’t have an alternative yet as far as video is concerned. Wherever it can, Google has been steering away from Flash; for example, Goggle uses Ajax for both e-mail and map services. Ajax is a open standard for web interactions, which is a bit difficult to develop as compared with Flash. However, overall Adobe is still quite small in front of both Microsoft and Google in terms of market capitalization, and has still limited set of products to offer compared to the other two.
Reference:
Palmer, J. (2007). Software That Keeps the Web Spinning: High-Wired Act. Barron’s. 87(16), p. 27-31. Retrieved April 25, 2007, from ProQuest Database.
