Courtesy of Mark Anderson comes a great quote from Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen:

“Oh, I love Google. Google is a big threat for Microsoft and distracts it from the rest of us. [Google] is simultaneously our heat shield and an important partner.” — quoted in the German financial weekly Euro am Sonntag.

Bruce is downplaying the fact that Adobe and MS are getting ready for a major battle first over file formats (PDF and Flash are just too big), then over the online designer community and the mobile presentation tier and, finally, over a generation of online applications.

The more successful a company becomes, the more people are gunning for its place. Richard Sarnoff, a leading Bertelsmann exec, commented along similar lines in a discussion this week that “all large companies experience margin pressure.” These are high-class problems to have. Unless your company becomes very successful, you’ll probably never experience them. If you do, it really helps to have some big, powerful friends with aligned interests.