Adobe 2007 Annual Report Download - page 25

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Business Productivity Solutions
With our Adobe Acrobat business, we continue to see an increase in competition from Microsoft. Microsoft has released
its new operating system called Windows Vista which includes a proprietary digital rights management technology and a new
document format, called XML Paper Specification (“XPS”), which competes with Adobe PDF. In addition, Microsoft’ s new
version of its widely used Office product offers a feature to save Microsoft Office documents as PDF files through a freely
distributed plug-in. This new PDF feature in Office competes with Adobe Acrobat. Given Microsoft’ s market dominance,
XPS, the PDF feature in Office and any other competitive Microsoft product or technology that is bundled as part of its
Office product or operating system or made freely available, could harm our overall Adobe Acrobat market opportunity.
Our Adobe Acrobat product family also faces competition in the PDF file creation market from many clone products
marketed by companies such as AdLib, Active PDF, Ansyr Technology, Apple, Global Graphics, Nuance, Software995,
Sourcenext and others. In addition, other PDF creation solutions can be found at a low cost, or for free, on the Web.
For customers that use Adobe Acrobat Standard and Adobe Acrobat Professional as part of document collaboration and
document process management solutions, where electronic document delivery, exchange, collaboration, security and archival
needs exist, our Acrobat product family faces competition from entrenched office applications such as Microsoft Office. In
the higher end of the electronic document market, Acrobat Professional provides features which compete with other creative
professional PDF tool providers, such as Enfocus, Dalim, TeamPDF and Zinio. In addition, we are targeting the architecture,
engineering and construction electronic document collaboration market with our Acrobat 3D product. The capabilities of our
product in this market compete with some aspects of Autodesk’ s 3D solution.
To address the threats from Microsoft and others, we are working to ensure our Adobe Acrobat applications stay at the
forefront of innovation in emerging opportunities such as PDF document generation, document collaboration and document
process management.
Our Web conferencing solution, Adobe Acrobat Connect, faces competition from many Web conferencing vendors,
including Cisco through their acquisition of WebEx, as well as Microsoft Office Live Meeting, IBM Lotus Sametime and
Citrix GoToMeeting. Cisco WebEx is a market share leader, and Microsoft has steadily increased its marketing of Microsoft
Office Live Meeting. To address these and other smaller competitors in the Web conferencing space, we focus on providing a
differentiated and enhanced user experience through our Adobe Flash Player.
The markets we address with our Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite and Adobe Flex products are influenced by
evolving industry standards, rapid software and hardware technology developments, and new product introductions from
competitors such as Microsoft and IBM.
Microsoft has already brought to market new products and technologies to address many of the emerging market needs
we focus on with our Adobe LiveCycle family of products. Microsoft continues to offer its eForms solution called InfoPath
in the Professional version of Microsoft Office 2007, and has added Office Forms Services which extends their forms to users
as MS Outlook email messages or to Web browsers rather than the InfoPath client. They also continue to offer their
Windows Rights Management Services in their Windows Server product which is designed to allow corporate networks to
manage and enforce restrictions built into documents.
As discussed previously, Microsoft has shipped Windows Vista which includes a new document format called XPS
which competes with Adobe PDF. Windows Vista also contains a proprietary digital rights management technology which
competes with Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES. In addition, Microsoft’ s new version of Office includes an updated
version of its SharePoint product which competes with certain aspects of our Adobe LiveCycle products. Microsoft has also
recently delivered technology called Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight which offers an alternative to building
RIA applications within the Microsoft .NET framework.
In the electronic forms solution market, in addition to competition from Microsoft Infopath based solutions, we face
competition from IBM through their eForms solution recently rebranded as Lotus Workplace Forms. Similarly, we face
competition for document process management solutions from workflow solution vendors such as PegaSystems, Lombardi,
Nuance and Ultimus.
We believe that our Adobe LiveCycle server product family competes favorably against these companies and formats in
terms of the combined benefits of superior functionality, cross-platform visual page fidelity/reliability, multi-platform