Adobe, Microsoft CEOs Make News At RIM's BlackBerry World

The company also said it would give away more than 6,000 BlackBerry PlayBooks to attendees of this week’s BlackBerry World conference -- a major effort to seed the market with company’s strategic new PlayBook tablet.

Adobe gave a major boost to the PlayBook, saying the company would make its vaunted creative application software run on the new tablet.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen joined Research In Motion Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis on stage during Lazaridis' keynote speech and praised the work both companies have done on the PlayBook, which launched two weeks ago.

"We're particularly proud of the work we've been able to do on the video side [with the PlayBook]," Narayen said. "It's exciting to see the great, great feedback we've gotten." Narayen said Adobe will begin shipping its Creative Suite 5.5 Tuesday, including the latest version of Adobe Flash Builder that will support "out-of-the-box development" for apps for PlayBook.

Said Narayen: "We intend to bring our creative applications to the PlayBook."

Such a move is a major victory for RIM in its quest to catch up to competing platforms including Apple's iPad and Android-based tablets. It would be a particular blow to Apple, which has enjoyed market-leading synergy between its Mac OS X platforms and Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, video production and more software applications but does not support them on its iOS platforms. In fact, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has frequently talked down Flash as an option for its iOS devices, creating friction with Adobe executives in the process.

Lazaridis and Narayen appeared to play strongly off that friction with Apple in their keynote and highlighted the strength of Flash video and apps on the PlayBook platform as superior to anything else in the tablet market.

Following Narayen, Lazaridis stunned the almost 6,000 attendees of the conference by introducing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose Windows Phone 7 competes with BlackBerry. Ballmer revealed a partnership with RIM to embed its Bing search technology into BlackBerry smartphones. The integration is designed to speed up decision-making and decision-based activities using BlackBerries, Ballmer said.

"Bing will be a way that creates real value integrated into the BlackBerry experience starting this holiday season," Ballmer said. "Bing will be deeply integrated at the BlackBerry operating system level. It will make search a core component of the handset beyond the application experience." He said the partnership brings "opportunities to create unique experiences together. We will also market and promote the strength of our joint offerings.

"It's way beyond a search box," Ballmer said of Bing on BlackBerry. "It's about finding real tools that help people get things done. We share this vision with our partners at RIM."

For RIM, which launched its PlayBook to initial tepid reviews and revealed last week that BlackBerry sales had been disappointing of late, the announcements and personal appearances by both Narayen and Ballmer were major coups as it works to take on both Apple and Google (founder of the Android platform.)

The BlackBerry World conference includes more than 6,000 attendees from more than 120 countries and is being covered by more than 150 journalists and bloggers. RIM spokesmen say it is the largest of the 10 annual conferences the company has had.