Microsoft unveils rivals to Adobe tools!

[Dashken]

LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft's long list of competitors just became a little longer.

The Redmond company unveiled its new collection of professional graphic design and animation tools Wednesday, moving into the longtime domain of Adobe Systems and the company Adobe is acquiring, Macromedia.

The Microsoft Expression tools, still in preliminary form, demonstrate the company's continued willingness to tackle more areas of the software business -- even if that means competing with other companies that make software for Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Microsoft's new tools -- code-named "Acrylic," "Quartz" and "Sparkle" -- promise to rival programs including Adobe Illustrator, Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Flash. But an Adobe official downplayed the competitive implications after watching Microsoft demonstrate the products at a conference here.

"We're pretty confident that our graphics customers will continue to look to Adobe tools to provide a rich and full array of graphics functionality," said Pam Deziel, Adobe's director of platform strategy.

Microsoft, to be sure, is considerably more bullish about its new initiative. The company believes the new Expression tools will be "a great step forward" in the way people create and use programs on the Web and on Windows, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president in Microsoft's Developer Division.

The company showed the new tools on the second day of its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. In addition, Microsoft demonstrated new capabilities to be included in the upcoming version of Office for managing the flow of data and documents through businesses.

The new Office programs, scheduled for release next year, will seek to build on Microsoft's dominant presence in that market. In contrast, in the graphic design and animation fields, it's Adobe and Macromedia that hold the upper hand.

Although Microsoft will no doubt convert some Adobe and Macromedia customers, the design community's loyalty to those companies -- and its tendency to be wary of Microsoft -- should diminish the impact of the new tools, said Karen Haus, an analyst with WR Hambrecht + Co.

"I just think it is going to be harder for them to get a significant share of the hard-core creative market," Haus said.

Adobe is based in San Jose, Calif., with a large satellite operation in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood. It expects its $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia to close in the fall.

Microsoft is also moving into Adobe's territory in another area. Windows Vista includes a technology called XML Paper Specification, formerly known as Metro, that offers document-imaging capabilities similar to Adobe's PDF technology.

In the design market, Somasegar acknowledged that "there may be some overlap" between the Microsoft tools and existing programs from Adobe and Macromedia. However, he said, Microsoft considered it important to offer tools to let software makers capitalize on key advances in underlying Windows technologies.

He credited Adobe and Macromedia for being longtime Windows developers and said he expects Adobe to ultimately offer its own tools that similarly work in conjunction with the underlying operating-system advances.

Microsoft's Sparkle Interactive Designer, the new animation tool, will take advantage of the new graphics presentation system in the next version of the operating system, Windows Vista, due out next year. It would offer an alternative to such programs as Macromedia's popular Flash animation software.

The Acrylic Graphic Designer will be a painting, illustration and effects tool from Microsoft in the same general segment of the market as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Microsoft's Quartz Web Designer would rival Adobe's GoLive Web design program.

Microsoft showed the Expression programs in a series of demonstrations on stage at its conference Wednesday. Executives said the programs should improve the process of collaboration between software developers, who write the underlying code, and the designers who determine aspects including the on-screen appearance.

"There's a lot of great stuff in there," Eric Rudder, senior vice president in the company's Server and Tools division, told the audience, encouraging the attendees to try out preliminary versions of the programs and offer feedback.

Microsoft didn't announce expected pricing or release dates for the final versions of the new tools.

Somasegar said Sparkle will be released relatively soon after the launch of Windows Vista in the second half of next year.

Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...msftpdc15.html