Sunday, 10 October 2010

Are Adobe and Microsoft flirting with each other?

WORLD (Agencies) The specialized media has been talking about it for a while, but The New York Times reported last week that Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, recently showed up with a small entourage of deputies at Adobe’s offices to hold a secret meeting with Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen. The thrust of the talks, according to NYT, was about Apple's ever-increasing control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could get together to combat Steve Jobs's company. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft was among the options. Adobe and Microsoft have been rivals with competing software for years, but they got really combative in 2007 when Microsoft began promoting Silverlight, its software plug-in for the Web that directly competes with Adobe Flash. For those even less techie than ourselves, you will probably be using Adobe Reader to read PDF files, which usually comes free with your computer and is downloadable gratis. As for Microsoft, we all know what it does: controls everything except, it seems, the mobile phone market.

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