Microsoft plots Macromedia acquisition as plot against Java

“Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc, lining up a deal that would throw enterprise Java into a spin, Gavin Clarke writes. Industry and analyst sources believe Microsoft covets San Francisco, California-based Macromedia’s Flash vector graphics design tool and player, which was radically updated this year. Microsoft’s own scripting efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform Flash, which now supports XML, Unicode, MP3 and HTML and which was taken closer towards Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2002. The Flash Player, meanwhile, is compatible with most browsers and used on nearly 90% of desktops,” reports The Register. Full story here.