The eLearning Guild's latest report on authoring and development tools shows just how dominant Adobe have become, at least in the US market. Just look at these results, showing the market share of tools in various categories:

• Rapid development tools: #1 Captivate (65% of Guild members); #4 Presenter (26%)
• Courseware authoring, i.e. more serious tools: #1 Captivate (60%); #2 Flash (47%); #3 Dreamweaver (43%); #5 Authorware (16%).
• Simulation tools: #1 Captivate (79%); #2 Flash (45%).
• Audio recording (!!!!): #1 Captivate (44%).
• Animation: #1 Flash (78%).
• Photo editing: #1 Photoshop (84%); #2 Illustrator (which doesn't even do photo editing) (35%).
• Screen event capture: #1 Captivate (64%).
• Video creation: #1 Premiere (70%).
• Video recording (!!!!): #1 Captivate (48%).

Looks like Captivate is being used for just about everything, whether or not it's designed for that job. And given that Captivate and Adobe Presenter both output to Flash, a very high proportion of e-learning content seems to be in that format.

As the authors of the report point out, these figures are a little misleading, because although a high proportion of survey respondents may use Captivate, it isn't necessarily the tool they use most frequently. Although that may well be an Adobe tool also!

In the corporate world at least, a major factor in choosing a software tool is the financial stability of the vendor, and if Adobe isn't financially stable with this portfolio, then someone needs firing. Financial stability implies that the vendor is going to be around long enough so you can continue to maintain your data long into the future - not that it always works out that way, with Adobe discontinuing development on Authorware!