The tech world explodes (this is the most Adobe talk I’ve ever seen on Techmeme) about Adobe telling MSFT to yank PDF and Scoble chimes in, Brian Jones throws in his two cents but the silence from Adobe is deafening.

This has become a big story, and I think a lot of it is misinformation and FUD, but the blank stare from Adobe does nothing advance the conversation. There are big issues here, on both sides, and while I realize that blogs provide the same level of civility as the wild west, we would all be well served by more open and communication about what happened.

A bit of a warning, this is going to trend towards the sensationalist. I’m not trying to come off like a crazy seer on the Ides of March, but I think this has huge implications.

For those who don’t know, talks broke down between Microsoft and Adobe regarding PDF integration to Office 2007. Microsoft monitor has some of the story here and Robert Scoble has picked it up as well. The Microsoft Monitor article is a good read, and makes some excellent points.

This isn’t really about PDF, it’s about software. While I’ll doubt you’ll get anyone at Microsoft to admit it, and Scoble tries to play nice, Adobe is a big, big competitor. A few years ago, the partnership worked very well, but as the industry has changed, the two companies have inched closer to each other’s market space.

Both companies are trying to change the way people use and develop software. Both companies realize the importance of designers in the new software world, and both companies know that the industry is being turned upside down. The potential gain is immense, and the stakes are very high. For the first time ever, Adobe is infringing on Microsoft’s core business. If Adobe can make the OS a non-factor, MSFT is in big trouble, and they know it.

This is going to get much worse before it gets better, but I think it’s an exciting time to follow software.

I just got off the phone with Microsoft talking about WPF and WPF/E and I came away very impressed, but also with more questions than I had going in. Tonight I’m going to be sitting down and putting most of my thoughts over on ZDNet, but there were a couple of things that I thought a more Flash oriented audience might want to read about.

I have always thought that WPF/E was a direct competitor to Flash. In some ways, it is, but Microsoft has a very different vision for WPF/E than Adobe does for Flash. With Flash, the goal is to deliver full fledged cross platform applications. With Microsoft, if you want to create an entire application, you’re going to use WPF, which limits you to Windows. WPF/E is more of an “interactive content” plugin. For instance you could build an application like Word (delivered over the web) in WPF, but not in WPF/E.

As the picture becomes clearer to me, WPF and Apollo are on a collision course. Both technologies are still in the early stages, and we’re not sure what the end product looks like, but that seems to be where some of the farm is being bet (how’s that for a sentence?). Apollo has the potential to be WPF, but cross platform. That has some significant implications for both companies? long term strategy. Can they both deliver on the promises? We’ll see. But the things WPF can do by taking advantage of the hardware acceleration via DirectX is going to set a high bar. It won’t be cross platform, but it will be impressive.

I realize this is kind of scattered, but I want to take some time to get the full picture in my mind. I have a much better understanding of WPF, and I’m still piecing together how that all fits in with what I know of everything else. Look for more on my ZDNet blog tonight.