23 Musings

So, Adobe have announced the acquisition of an interesting company. Virtual Ubiquity have a very cool online wordprocessing tool called Buzzword. This brings Adobe into a new arena of competition where it hasn't really focused up to now. They will now be going head to head with Google, Zoho, Thinkfree and Microsoft.

What's most intriguing about this deal is just how good a Flash based wordprocessor could actually be. Flash, if well constructed, can be incredibly easy to use, something that any online office tool must have as its key selling point.

Throw in Adobes new service Share, which allows users to share and publish online documents, and the portability and ease of use of PDF files and Adobe could have quite an engaging offering quite quickly. Share also includes REST API's to allow document data to be integrated into other apps.

The plan is for it to be ported over to AIR 1.0 when that is released early next year, giving Buzzword offline capabilities as well. Could they beat Google to this holy grail of the online office app?

Things are getting interesting, time for Microsoft to make their move perhaps? Silverlight?