Microsoft's Next Target: Adobe
This is hardly news, but the actual plan is just starting to come out. This is yet another "we buy the 3rd best product/company on the market, tie it to Windows, then market the hell out of it." This is how Microsoft extends its dominance through the distribution channel, which is where 90% of consumers get all of their products. Until Firefox, over 90% of consumers use Spyglass Explorer, more commonly known as Internet Explorer now. In the case of Adobe, the company Microsoft purchased back in 2003 was Creative House, largely for their Expression software.
Renamed "Microsoft Acrylic," it ties in perfectly with their plans for the "Avalon" presentation system of Windows Vista (NT 6.0, codenamed "Longhorn," client). Although the first rendition of the Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF) 1.x which "Avalon" uses is based on aging DirectX 9.x and no where near the capabilities of Apple's QuartzExtreme, FreeDesktop.org's Cairo or Sun's Looking Glass, all based on OpenGL, the idea is eventually to get there with WGF 2.0 based on work-in-progress DirectX 10 (no longer to be named such) due in late 2007. As such, all future Microsoft developments are targetting Avalon.
This means a seemless experience from 2D/3D print off-screen to presentation on-screen, including use of and storage in the graphics framebuffer, instead of the aged set of CPU-memory driven, overlapping pages of the legacy Graphical Display Interface (GDI). For those already running MacOS X with QuartzExtreme, possibly the Xgl Server or maybe Sun's Looking Glass preview on Linux, you've already discovered how powerful this presentation can be for 0 overhead (because it's done on your idling graphics processor unit, GPU, and its memory framebuffer). Again, it won't be until WGF 2.0 before Microsoft gets to the same level of capability, and the WGF 1.1 that will ship in Windows Vista will be rather limited and a resource hog (unlike QuartzExtreme). But Microsoft is still planning for the future.
Integration with Microsoft Office 12 (aka 2005) will be limited, but you can be sure that Acrylic is a preview of how Microsoft Office 13 for Vista will be presentation-wise. This includes finally bringing an unified equivalent to Windows that MacOS X and, more recently on the leading-edge, Linux users have had in the OpenGL-Postscript-SVG combination. As such, Windows could truly be considered a "graphics desktop," and Microsoft will be right there with a leading-edge application in Acrylic. Thus leaving Adobe to ponder if they could have prevented their demise better.
Maybe Adobe should have supported MacOS X, or possibly even Linux, better? Especially given the fact that Linux now dominates the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) world. In fact, when Disney finally put through the effort to get Photoshop running under WINE (WINdows Emulator) on Linux because the only application they were running on 30,000 Windows desktops was Photoshop (everything else, like Maya, was already running on Linux), it should have been a "wake up call" to Adobe. But now Adobe might be moving too little, too late, even though we won't see the end-game for Adobe for another 3-4 years when their bottom-line starts getting stretched.
I mean, should Microsoft actually deliver on the promise of WGF 2.0, which all their application developments seem to be based on, it's going to be a tough sell for Adobe, at least on Windows. So that leaves Adobe to maintain a staple on MacOS X (possible) and Linux -- especially Linux which has been adopted by the CGI world NOT for cost considerations, but capability. Again, Disney should have been the "wake up call" years ago that there are hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay big money for professional graphics suites on Linux.
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Renamed "Microsoft Acrylic," it ties in perfectly with their plans for the "Avalon" presentation system of Windows Vista (NT 6.0, codenamed "Longhorn," client). Although the first rendition of the Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF) 1.x which "Avalon" uses is based on aging DirectX 9.x and no where near the capabilities of Apple's QuartzExtreme, FreeDesktop.org's Cairo or Sun's Looking Glass, all based on OpenGL, the idea is eventually to get there with WGF 2.0 based on work-in-progress DirectX 10 (no longer to be named such) due in late 2007. As such, all future Microsoft developments are targetting Avalon.
This means a seemless experience from 2D/3D print off-screen to presentation on-screen, including use of and storage in the graphics framebuffer, instead of the aged set of CPU-memory driven, overlapping pages of the legacy Graphical Display Interface (GDI). For those already running MacOS X with QuartzExtreme, possibly the Xgl Server or maybe Sun's Looking Glass preview on Linux, you've already discovered how powerful this presentation can be for 0 overhead (because it's done on your idling graphics processor unit, GPU, and its memory framebuffer). Again, it won't be until WGF 2.0 before Microsoft gets to the same level of capability, and the WGF 1.1 that will ship in Windows Vista will be rather limited and a resource hog (unlike QuartzExtreme). But Microsoft is still planning for the future.
Integration with Microsoft Office 12 (aka 2005) will be limited, but you can be sure that Acrylic is a preview of how Microsoft Office 13 for Vista will be presentation-wise. This includes finally bringing an unified equivalent to Windows that MacOS X and, more recently on the leading-edge, Linux users have had in the OpenGL-Postscript-SVG combination. As such, Windows could truly be considered a "graphics desktop," and Microsoft will be right there with a leading-edge application in Acrylic. Thus leaving Adobe to ponder if they could have prevented their demise better.
Maybe Adobe should have supported MacOS X, or possibly even Linux, better? Especially given the fact that Linux now dominates the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) world. In fact, when Disney finally put through the effort to get Photoshop running under WINE (WINdows Emulator) on Linux because the only application they were running on 30,000 Windows desktops was Photoshop (everything else, like Maya, was already running on Linux), it should have been a "wake up call" to Adobe. But now Adobe might be moving too little, too late, even though we won't see the end-game for Adobe for another 3-4 years when their bottom-line starts getting stretched.
I mean, should Microsoft actually deliver on the promise of WGF 2.0, which all their application developments seem to be based on, it's going to be a tough sell for Adobe, at least on Windows. So that leaves Adobe to maintain a staple on MacOS X (possible) and Linux -- especially Linux which has been adopted by the CGI world NOT for cost considerations, but capability. Again, Disney should have been the "wake up call" years ago that there are hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay big money for professional graphics suites on Linux.
Related eWeek Article
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