That’s the thought I walked away with after my experiences at MAX this past week. I used to think of Adobe as this cute, fuzzy bunny of a company with great designer and RIA tools (plus that PDF reader thing). Friendly, happy-go-lucky Adobe, loved by all and inspiring fear in no one.

Adobe’s roots, postscript fonts notwithstanding, are in delivering great tools to designers. The Macromedia acquisition of 2005 extended Adobe’s capabilities to delivering rich user experiences to end-users with Flash (and to a lesser degree with ColdFusion). Macromedia was also a company with a narrow focus. Together, the new Adobe could offer end-to-end rich internet solutions from designer to developer. A great story, but RIA was still in a nascent stage. Adobe remained a fuzzy bunny of a company albeit one that did a great job as a steward of its acquired property in Macromedia (primarily Flash and ColdFusion – I can’t imagine any Flash or CF developers being justifiably upset at how Adobe has advanced those platforms).

RIA is no longer in a nascent stage as evidenced by the entry of Microsoft. I’ve characterized the RIA landscape as a “battle royale” between Flash and Silverlight, and I believe this is becoming truer every day. Ignored by Microsoft for years, Adobe is now in a battle  against one of the largest “megavendors” on the planet for mind and market share. Of course Adobe has a huge lead, but Microsoft has plenty of resources to play catch up (or at least to try).

The emergence of a well-funded, competent rival in Adobe’s core business forces the company to become more strategic about its growth. We can see the beginnings of a strategic shift underway.

The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog

Adobe’s success has been tied to PDF and Flash for years, but lately all of the company’s eggs have transitioned toward the Flash basket. They’ve got a Flash-based BPM product (LiveCycle), Flash-based developer tools (Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, the Flex Framework), even Flash inside of PDF (PDF Portfolios). With the acquisition of Omniture and the various LiveCycle/Flash services – for now collaboration and distribution – and the unification of the Flash runtime for mobile and desktop, plus the Flash iPhone development announcement, the company is erecting all kinds of barriers to imitation to keep Microsoft at bay.

Can Microsoft copy some of this stuff? Sure. Microsoft can buy an analytics company, they can create various Silverlight-oriented cloud services, and they can conceivably buy enough influence and expertise to get Silverlight on tons of mobile devices. It will cost a lot, but Redmond has scads of cash if they want to commit it to the fight. I’m not sure they’ll do so, but even if they do, it will take time to harvest their investment.

Rather than focus on core capabilities of Flash itself, Adobe is creating complements that improve the value drivers of the Flash runtime. Microsoft, to this point at least, has focused on making Silverlight functionally equivalent to the Flash runtime itself, a task which took the better part of two years. Now, I am not putting down Microsoft; delivering Silverlight 3 in two years is impressive considering how much time has been invested into Flash. Nor do I believe that Adobe is sitting still in terms of Flash player technology (the announcement of Flash 10.1 should put that to rest). I do believe that Adobe has created some very nice complements to the Flash runtime that Microsoft will be hard-pressed to repeat in less than 12-18 months (unless they’re already working on them, of which I have no knowledge).

I commented to several of my peers that I believe Adobe’s shift signals an intent to become what Gartner calls a “megavendor.” What’s a megavendor? To tell you the truth, I think its one of those things you understand when you see one. Today we recognize SAP, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle as megavendors. These firms offer huge breadth of product lines. Adobe’s not there yet, but I think it would like to be. The fuzzy bunny has teeth.

disclosure: I am a paid shill for neither Adobe nor Microsoft. =)