In the technology industry, you can be pretty sure you've hit the big time when Microsoft develops a product specifically to compete with you.

That's the position Adobe Systems found itself in this year, when Microsoft developed a new cross-platform browser technology called Silverlight to rival Adobe's Flash, the de facto standard for developing and delivering video and multimedia content on the Web.

Adobe is exiting the year not only as the company of choice for creative professionals everywhere, but as an influential force to be reckoned with and a power player alongside Apple and Google, the companies leading the consumer-savvy, multimedia-friendly Internet wave of Web 2.0.

Over its 25 years, Adobe -- a company known less for its dazzle than its dependability -- has quietly turned itself into a multibillion-dollar software vendor on the strength of technologies that have become essential to computer users. Creative professionals would be lost without the graphic-design tools Photoshop and Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat and PDF have made it easy for everyone to share documents cross-platform.

But with its acquisition of Macromedia two years ago, Adobe also took on another role -- as pioneer of providing a next-generation platform for developing rich Internet applications. RIAs, as they're called, provide more intuitive and multimedia-rich user experiences on the Web than typical client/server or desktop applications, and are now in high demand as users expect more from their multimedia Web experiences with the rise in popularity of sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Still, though the proud owner of PDF and Flash, two of the most ubiquitous technologies in the history of desktop computers, Adobe has never enjoyed the same powerful brand recognition as contemporaries that have also built widely used technology. While Google's search engine inspired the addition of the word "google" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Adobe's technologies have always spoken louder than the company's name itself.

"Adobe is not a real sexy brand," acknowledged Keith Cutcliffe, a professional Web designer and developer who uses the company's software.

Indeed, Anthony Franco, president of Denver-based application design and development firm EffectiveUI, said his company leads customer engagements by talking about the Flash Player, not necessarily Adobe itself, because the technology is so well known. "It's the brand recognition of the Flash Player first, then we connect the dots," he said.

But that has begun to change. Adobe took charge of the Macromedia acquisition this year, eliminating that company's brand and merging its own long-popular graphics tools with Web-design tools acquired from Macromedia, such as Dreamweaver and the aforementioned Flash, into Creative Suite 3.