Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 10

Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what appears at face-value from data on book sales.

Silverlight 2 is the product that Microsoft is backing in the RIA race. That in itself is worth, at least, some restless nights. Silverlight has not become a publishing event. At the present time, there are 10 Silverlight books published yet only one is on the current release and is truly a 2 book because it offers free, or paid, updates all the way through to a FCS launch.

But it does appear as though Silverlight is gaining some ground on Adobe. At least on Search volume. The image below shows the Google Trends for these technologies

silverlight [blue] adobe flash [red] adobe flex [orange] adobe air [green]

        A.    Adobe AIR Puts Companies on Desktops

        B.     Adobe Introduces Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex 3 Software

        C.    Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight to mobiles

        D.     Microsoft reveals new content partners, DRM for Silverlight

        E.    Microsoft to highlight Silverlight, 'Oslo' at show

        F.     Onstream Media Debuts Microsoft Silverlight Webcasting Service So the long and short of this is that Silverlight is likely not causing Adobe to lose sleep at night, but rather giving them one of those a rough, restless nights ... knowing that soon Microsoft will launch a credible product aimed squarely at them.

What's Keeping Adobe Up at Night? Probably Not Silverlight.

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 19

Roger Magoulas, our director of research, sent out the recent comment and graph as part of his weekly analysis of the latest load of our Bookscan-based data mart:

What's keeping Adobe up at night? Probably not Silverlight. I noticed the Silverlight topic looking bright red [in the treemap visualization that shows week-to-week changes by topic] and thought I would take a look - see the chart below. Since Silverlight and the somewhat related Expression Web books started appearing in October, we don't see much trendworthy activity. We do see Flash selling 6-7 times the units as Expression Web, Flash experiencing a holiday bump and Flex increasing steadily. Silverlight and Expression Web are young and Microsoft famously sticks by its products - should be an interesting topic to follow.

In short, if book sales are any indicator, traction for Silverlight appears to be quite low.

While Roger is correct in noting that it's never wise to count Microsoft out, so far it does appear that they haven't made much of a dent in Flash's dominance. SearchEngineWatch recently reported that even Microsoft is still not using Silverlight on many of its web properties.