Moss on the brain?

I caught a weird Twit from a friend who forwarded it to me. Scott Barnes, an evangelist for Microsoft, made fun of LiveCycle by pointing to a 1988 demo of a Wang document with rudimentary voice, CRUD and digsig features. In his twit, he labeled it "the best Adobe LiveCycle sales pitch i've ever seen.. well done Adobe". The twit (note: using the word "twit" to refer to the twitter entry in this case; not the person who wrote it) can be found here.

I got curious to know why he is picking on LiveCycle and followed it to the MossyBlog. Being Canadian, I know that moss usually grows on things that do not get enough direct sunlight and has a way of sucking the life out of the host. It is curious to see a blog use this metaphor as its primary moniker.

Nevertheless, after reading a bit and becoming completely bored, I have to surmise that he is getting paid to knock LiveCycle, has not seen a demo (most demos involve Microsoft technology too such as office, Win 2003 server, .NET framework 1.1 and more), and has no idea what LiveCycle ES is.

I only hope that someone at Microsoft realizes that Adobe and Microsoft have worked together very hard to bring LiveCycle to the market on the Microsoft platform. We have worked hard on the development of standards and protocols for the WS-* stack, including WS-Security, the Kerberos protocol, integration with Active Directory and much more. Most intelligent document workflows start out authoring documents in Microsoft Office so we need to work together for the benefit of the customer.

Yes - we do compete in some areas but increasingly, both companies are working towards a common good - satisfying their customers!

Makes me curious why he would willingly mock all the work Microsoft and Adobe have done together over the years. I guess when you only blog and don't spend time in real customer engagements, this cause might get lost. Nuff said!