Microsoft gunning for Adobe

Microsoft is like a bull in a china shop. It tries to take Adobe head-​on! It all started with the take over of Creature’s House Expres­sion in sep­tem­ber 2003. To use as a devel­op­ment tool and to show off WPF.
After that Microsoft bought iView Mul­ti­me­dia. iView Mul­ti­me­dia will become Microsoft Expres­sion Media in the next release of Microsoft Expres­sion Studio. - Please hold on… GLA (Geek Lan­guage Alert)! - Win­dows Vista has a Pre­sen­ta­tion Foun­da­tion (WPF) just like the Mac has Quartz, WPF (for­merly code named Avalon) is the graph­i­cal (com­posit­ing) sub­sys­tem of the .NET Frame­work 3.0 (for­merly called WinFX) …still with me? and is direct related to XAML (eXten­si­ble Appli­ca­tion Markup Lan­guage). So what this crap mean? Well it means Microsoft is devel­op­ing it’s own Graphic Foun­da­tion Layer in it’s next-​gen Oper­at­ing System, noth­ing wrong with that, you might say!? Only Microsoft always has the urge not to com­pete, but to destroy it’s com­peti­tors!
So let’s skip a few months to the present. Microsoft recently dropped the abil­ity of Microsoft Office 2007 to save as PDF but it will make the fea­ture avail­able through a down­load­able add-​on. So why did Adobe pre­vent Microsoft of using PDF in MS-​Office, the most requested fea­ture? Well Microsoft designed it’s own ‘open’ doc­u­ment format called XPS. XPS (XML Paper Spec­i­fi­ca­tion) (for­merly called Metro) is a XML based elec­tronic doc­u­ment format, a spool format and a page descrip­tion lan­guage and works tightly together with Vista’s new print­ing sub­sys­tem. Hooray they all cheered, finally the Mac­in­tosh way of print­ing! That’s the only reason Microsoft needed PDF. (Well see it as a tran­si­tional phase
Last year Adobe bought Macro­me­dia cre­at­ing a monop­o­lis­tic 10 pound graphic gorilla. Microsoft is fore­see­ing that Adobe become to pow­er­ful and is cre­at­ing it’s own alter­na­tive cre­ative suite. Don’t get me wrong I love com­pe­ti­tion it’s good for the market and it’s good for the con­sumer. But Microsoft has to port it’s tech­nolo­gies and appli­ca­tions to the Mac­in­tosh plat­form to suc­ceed. Mac­in­tosh users aren’t savvy to use Microsoft prod­ucts. Now and then they kill (EOL) some of their apps (Win­dows Media Player, Inter­net Explorer etc.) which isn’t help­ful either, get­ting trust in the Mac­in­tosh com­mu­nity. Also Microsoft has huge iden­tity prob­lems, they really would like to be cool like Apple, as seen in efforts like XBox and Zune, but it’s like Steve Jobs said:

…Microsoft has no taste…