That's the point though, Adobe doesn't have a big stick like MS. Adobe's stick is significantly smaller and they aren't using it to beat people over the head.
Adobe isn't anywhere near as prevalent nor powerful as MS (especially mid- 90's MS). Outside of it's relatively small niche Adobe doesn't have much influence. If you are worried about Adobe you should be down right terrified of companies like Apple, MS, Google, Comcast, Viacom, TimeWarner, AT&T, etc.,. Adobe just wants to sell software solutions to the professional creative industry. Those other companies want to control the access to, and creation & dissemination of, information. Much bigger stakes, IMO.
It highly depends in which field you are earning your money. Personally I never felt the M$ beating stick, because the only product I ever bought from them was an OEM copy of XP installed with WMware Fusion. It was for the sole purpose of checking out how my web designs were working with IE. I also never had to buy Office my whole life, because my job simply was never dependent on it.
As a graphic designer and Mac user my work solely relies on access to products, tools and services from Apple and Adobe, plus of course Google's search engine.
Telecommunication companies are less of a problem in my country. There are already strong anti-monopoly laws in place and takeovers of competitors have been successfully prevented by this.
I'm not so sure that Adobe won't sooner or later be running into a major problem in Europe...
Microsoft and Apple both already have. M$ only for the minor offense of installing the free IE automatically with their OS. Something Apple only gets away with because they have no monopolist position with their OS.
But in the global publishing and print industry Adobe has probably more power than Apple and Microsoft, and dominates the market even more than M$ ever dominated the desktop OS market.
If somehow the Acrobat backbone technology would disappear over-night, no newspaper, no magazine and not many other printed products could be produced across the world for months! Digital print would die overnight!
Just imagine all the white boxes with food at your local Safeway and the resulting confusion
Certainly Adobe's dominance is much less prominent with internet and video media. These are also the areas where work-arounds for disgruntled Adobe customers are possible.
