Last week, two announcements in the world of consumer music technology showed where things are going in that market segment: First, Apple announced its best fiscal fourth quarter financials in nearly a decade -- fueled by sales of 2.02 million iPods and of course the itinerant iTunes Store downloads that go with those sales.

Second, at Japanese tech show Ceatec 2004, Sony -- the company that brought us Betamax way too late to kill off the technically inferior VHS -- announced its own MP3 player last week, along with Toshiba, whose new 60GB ?iPod killer? will both challenge Apple?s 58% of the market.

Just like Microsoft will be ?taking off the gloves? with InfoPath and ostensibly challenging Adobe to a heavyweight bout for the heart of the PDF forms user.

Sure, in both the MP3 player and forms markets, the new competition isn?t to be taken lightly. But those who were first to market with innovative ideas -- in this case, Apple and Adobe -- have got to be feeling sanguine about being able to meet their competition mano a mano.

Key to Apple?s domination is iTunes, a cross-platform MP3 management system free to anyone who wants to download it for a Mac OS or Windows machine, whether they own an iPod or not. Like iTunes, Adobe made Reader free. That helped it find its way to 700 million desktops worldwide.

iTunes has many great features that make it more useful than its competitors, especially simple, yet powerful, organizational tools. Like iTunes, Reader has a feature set that InfoPath?s product can?t match, at least so far: Reader can support digital signatures and can make rich-yet-secure complex documents?documents that print

Jim Healy, chief technology officer and founder of FormRouter, thinks there?s no comparison. PDF?s there, and InfoPath lags behind. That?s why he put his money where his mouth is -- last week, the tiny company announced it spent considerable resources inking a deal with Adobe to license pieces of Adobe Reader Extensions Server so that FormRouter customers can make forms that can be saved offline in Reader.

?There?s radical differences between PDF and InfoPath,? Healy says. ?What we find is that when people are producing more advanced forms, they have more multimedia and graphical elements to them. I personally feel that, in this space, Adobe?s got a huge lead. An absolutely enormous lead. And it?s been well adopted -- and accepted -- especially at the government level.?

Sure, you never, ever count Microsoft out. Witness their late-round knockout of Netscape in the Internet browser space, after taking a beating for years--sort of like perennial champ George Foreman used to do in the boxing ring, taking a licking en route to delivering that one last roundhouse to floor his opponent and win the bout.

But for now, like Apple in the iPod space, Adobe?s PDF strategy keeps the company nimbly fending off competitors, floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. So far, they?ve manhandled the slow-footed bully from Redmond.

This year, with Adobe LiveCycle software packages taking root in more and more large government, education and corporate sites each day, PDF has turned into the heavyweight that industry insiders had predicted it would eventually be, while InfoPath remains a punch-drunk bush-leaguer. InfoPath might someday rival PDF in its deployment and capability but will it be too late, as it was for Betamax and will likely be for Sony?s upcoming entree into the MP3 player market? Those who make their living on the PDF side of the fence can only hope.