Adobe Buzzes Into Online Productivity Market

By Greg McNevin

October 4, 2007: Just in case there wasn’t already enough companies trying to nail down online office productivity turf, Adobe has decided to muscle in via the acquisition of the online word processed Buzzword.

Unveiled at its Adobe MAX conference earlier this week, the company’s acquisition of Buzzword developer Virtual Ubiquity has given it an immediate footing in online text editing, and one that will be significantly extended when the firm links it up with its new online file sharing utility “Share” (currently in beta).

The company says Buzzword and Share provide users with the ability to easily share, publish and organise documents online. It claims the software enables “page perfect documents” to be created and due to it being built with Adobe Flex and used via the firm’s Flash Player, it says the software is imbued with strong page layout controls and robust support for integrated graphics.

Adobe claims PDF and OpenDocument Format (ODF) support is also on the way.

The acquisition puts Adobe in direct competition with GoogleDocs, Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace and a plethora of established and emerging online word processing firms including ajax13 and Zoho. And with the company also releasing a new media player tool, it certainly isn’t shying away from competition with both Google and Microsoft.

“For over a decade, Adobe Acrobat software and PDF have been the standard way people share and collaborate on high value documents across platforms, with perfect fidelity,” said David Mendels, senior vice president, Business Productivity Business Unit at Adobe. “Buzzword will build on that leadership and enable fundamental improvements in how people collaborate on documents.”

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