In the other corner, Adobe and Flash already own the mindshare in the long-term — because Flash is, in multimedia terms, already older than dirt and quite lovable, like George Foreman. In the short-term Adobe's ahead too, basking in a couple months' worth of headlines after a splashy June Acrobat 9 release. Recently, my colleague Darryl Taft broke down just exactly how much of a lead Adobe has over Microsoft and how they intend to maintain it.

The thing is, Microsoft and Adobe built their reputations and respective markets by empowering the everyday average office worker (or designer) to use technologies hitherto accessible only to tradespeople or brainy geeks. Desktop publishing, networking, even word processing were out of the realm of the average person until they came along.

Video, too, was best left to the camera dweebs.

Mass-market DV cameras and Apple iMovie changed all that, simplifying the process in the early 2000s. Now, Flash and Acrobat enable the average office worker who isn't completely technophobic to embed videos in PDF in documents more easily than ever before, and link them it to content and presentations that anyone with Adobe Reader on their machine can consume, offline. They have no idea they're leveraging Flash's murderously efficient codec scheme, or creating a little runtime player.

As its own proof-of-concept Adobe's Acrobat 9 reviewer's guide CD features video tutorials embedded in PDFs. They're relatively lightweight, look nice, and run smoothly in Reader.

Last week, a longtime reader and independent Acrobat expert emailed to say that he and some pals were having a difficult go of embedding the Silverlight flavor of WMV files in their PDFs; Acrobat 9 was throwing errors. That led to some conspiracy-theory musing on his part about Adobe's attitude toward Silverlight.

Adobe, in fact, tells me that embedding the most recent Silverlight in PDFs is a supported feature (as well as transcoding Silverlight to Flash, go figure), but sometimes the media player version or video codec present on the machines can lead to the errors.

Great. So that answers that. All this stuff is so new and evolving that you need the latest gear to just watch the stuff, it seems, which is the hard part of trying to predict if Flash or Silverlight will eventually take home the gold. Case in point: I've got the right browser plugins, OS, and everything else configured to watch the Olympics in beautiful Silverlight hi-def on my computer. NBC won't let me watch, though, because it feels my processor's too slow, and I have to go to my wife's newer laptop to check it out.

Furthermore, as a PDF mentor I interview frequently for this site put it in an email, Silverlight isn't trying to knock Flash out as much as it is Flex. He pointed me to an animated debate worth reading on Microsoft's Silverlight forums delving into this very issue. Silverlight media, he also says from his own experience, is much more difficult to create, work with, and execute.

That's an interesting point. Take a look at the Olympics site. Marvel at the technological glory—and we're not kidding, it is a testimony to man's media capabilities, with the dynamically changing, ever-updating links and navigation that's never been seen before on the Web. Problem is it's magic because of the design, production and IT army behind it. Mere mortals can't touch that.

Right now, Silverlight's a great idea, and that's all it is. Adobe's putting Flash in the hands of its users, and making it simpler to integrate into one's work projects, even via Acrobat. No doubt Tyson will hang around into the later rounds, but this wise guy predicts Foreman will eventually score that trademark knockout haymaker that felled a remarkable 68 opponents in his long career.