Adobe, Google Bundle Up

The old saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ seems to be a very
familiar one to Adobe Systems and Google, Microsoft’s two biggest rivals
these days. The two firms have linked arms in a multi-year agreement that
will see Google’s Toolbar included with various Adobe products.

The first product to be bundled with Google Toolbar will be Adobe’s
digital media player, Macromedia Shockwave Player. It will be offered as
part of the Shockwave installation process for Internet Explorer on Windows. Adobe says that Shockwave is installed on more than 55 percent of Internet-enabled desktop computers.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Google Toolbar will also be offered as part of other Adobe product installations in the future. The company declined to specify which ones.

Google Toolbar adds a Google search box to a Web
browser to perform searches without going to the Google home page. It
also has extra features like instant suggestions as you type in the search
box, a spellchecker, and a pop-up blocker.

This is the second big Google Toolbar announcement in the past month. In May, Google announced an agreement with Dell which is now preloading Google Desktop and Toolbar on its PCs, as well as adding Google Search to the Internet Explorer 6 side pane.

Google continues lead and even gain in the search market. The just-released May comScore Networks analysis showed Google as the market leader for the tenth consecutive month 44.1 percent of searches (Google picked up a point over April’s 43 percent). Yahoo was in second place with
27.9 percent, while MSN ranked third with 12.9 percent. Google and Yahoo
have 95 percent of the toolbar-based searches combined, with Google grabbing
49.1 percent of all toolbar searches.

Both companies have taken on a more openly adversarial relationship with
Microsoft recently, with Google competing on search,
online
advertising, and even spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, Adobe has been butting heads with Microsoft in the publishing
space. The San Jose, Calif.-based software firm has voiced its opposition
to Microsoft’s inclusion of saving files to Adobe’s PDF format in Office 2007.