Adobe Dented as Microsoft Mentions Competition

Updated from 5:01 p.m. EDT

Shares of Adobe Systems(ADBE Quote) sank Wednesday after Microsoft(MSFT Quote) unveiled a potential rival to Adobe's Acrobat product line. The jury is still out, however, on the magnitude and timing of the competitive threat.

On Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced plans to deliver the newest addition to the Office family, called XDocs. But taking advantage of Extensible Markup Language, or XML, XDocs will enable office workers to create forms tapping different types of data from multiple sources and also send data from forms to different parts of a business.

The first version of XDocs is slated for release in mid-2003, about the same time the next version of Office will be launched. ...