Adobe Systems

IBM has beefed up its web analytics abilities with its purchase of Coremetrics, an online marketing optimization company. This should be a concern for Adobe, which bought Coremetrics rival Omniture last year.

In my day job as a marketing exec at a green-tech company, I'm involved with Web development. And seeing how many of our customers come to us via Apple iPhones and iPads, it quickly became clear we had to future-proof our site by removing Flash.

The Internet may have already passed the apogee of influence for the crowd-sourced, user-generated ratings engines such as Yelp. Matters of taste are not best determined by a voting system: The Era of Mass Tastemaking online is officially over.

Despite declaring its love for Apple in major newspapers, Adobe hasn't always had a smooth working relationship with Apple -- perhaps less payback than incidental to Apple's plans to grab profit margin from chipmakers.

Adobe is countering Apple CEO Steve Jobs's recent jab at Adobe's Flash technology for Web video and games by running ads in newspapers and popular tech blogs saying "We Love Apple" -- with a bright red heart.

The Federal Trade Commission may be investigating Apple for anticompetitive behavior called "tying" -- an illegal technique of using power in one market to gain a monopoly in another. And that's precisely the illegal strategy that got Microsoft in so much hot water in the 1990s.

Judging by his recent frenetic behavior, Apple's CEO seems to view himself as a besieged general surrounded by advancing forces, making one last stand against the enemy, which in his case may be time itself. Problem is, Jobs may be jeopardizing his beloved company's long-term health.