Microsoft the Follower

Meanwhile, Lynch said Adobe has seen no real impact of the concentrated focus Microsoft has placed on some of Adobe's core business. Asked how the competition with Microsoft has been going, Lynch said:

"I would characterize it more as we've been going in an innovative direction for a long time at Adobe in terms of enabling people to express themselves with tools, get great clients out across the Web and get great server-side experiences. And what I see now is Microsoft starting to target each of those areas that we continue to innovate in and that we've been leading in for decades. But that is more of a following position than an innovative position. If you look at Silverlight versus Flash, for example, we've been deploying Flash on the Web for a decade to great success. There is no other technology that's as widely distributed as Flash today. We haven't seen any impact or lessening of Flash's momentum so far. In fact, acceleration is what we're seeing. Flash came from nowhere on video. By incorporating video in Flash Player across the Web, almost overnight we saw this incredible revolution and now over 90 percent of video streaming on the Web is actually in the Flash format."

In addition, with AIR, Microsoft has no solution in that space right now, Lynch said. "While it's competing with Flash via Silverlight, there is no competition for AIR right now from Microsoft. Except maybe from Windows, but that's an operating system. And AIR runs across operating systems. So that's kind of missing the point to say a particular OS is competing with AIR."

And in tooling, Lynch said Adobe's newly announced Creative Suite 4 "is just the best in the world at enabling people to express themselves. I would say Creative Suite is really light years ahead of where Microsoft is coming in with tooling. So we're just going to keep focusing on our customers, working to innovate and not be distracted by how we might be pursued in some cases."