Google and Adobe sign expansive distribution deal

Google and Adobe are jumping into each other's playground with the announcement that Adobe will be bundling the Google Toolbar with many (if not all) Adobe products for the life of the agreement. Well, this is significant for this reason -- Adobe controls two of the most widely-used technologies on the internet today: the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (used to read online documents) and the Macromedia Shockwave player (a de-facto multimedia player for rich media content like web advertising and short video segments).

With Adobe and Microsoft recently having a small tiff over the inclusion of PDF publishing in the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 productivity suite, this new deal with Adobe and Google is just another shot across the bow for Microsoft in its efforts to fend off the competition. Although I think Adobe was completely off its rocker by insisting that Microsoft take out native PDF publishing capabilities from its newest Office software suite (everyone else with PDF publishing capability doesn't seem to cause Adobe issues), this is no small deal for Google. It just gets the Google Toolbar installed on Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox -- which run the majority of all web browsing activity in the world today.

[Disclosure: I own MSFT shares as of 6-22-06)