Odd story about Adobe

Business 2.0 has a very odd story about how Adobe is beating Bill Gates, and I think it's odd because it is based on a couple of very odd ideas. First, Adobe is supposed to have "beaten Gates" because Microsoft's Picture It! software hasn't replaced PhotoShop. But anybody who actually looked at Picture It! would recognise that it's a cheap program aimed at home users, not a PhotoShop rival at all. In fact, Adobe is able to command amazingly high prices for its software precisely because it hasn't faced competition from Microsoft, which typically slashes prices at least in half, and usually a lot more. The second odd notion is that Microsoft's forthcoming XDocs program, renamed InfoPath, is supposed to rival Adobe Acrobat. Again, I don't see how this idea could survive five minutes actually looking at the two products. XDocs is an XML-based forms authoring application based on customer-written schema. (Who said SGML?) I can't image why anybody would decide to use that to create a PDF of, say, an advertising brochure, and that's by far the most common sort of thing Acrobat is used for. Of course, the Business 2.0 piece isn't any sort of technical article, it is the Tech Investor column, and tech investors are not exactly known for having a clue. But if there are tech investors who seriously think that Picture It! competes with PhotoShop, surely it would be a public service just to tell them not to be so daft.