Adobe getting into the online office market

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?

Adobe now deny looking into office tools

I blogged the other day about Adobe looking into using it's AIR platform to create an on/offline office suite of tools. Adobe have now come out to deny this.

Last week Mike Downey, Adobe's group manager for platform evangelism, hinted the company might be about to develop such software.

Downey clarified the situation in an interview. He said Adobe would focus primarily on providing its development platform, AIR, rather than creating online Office-style applications.

Downey said: "Our primary focus is building a platform that allows developers to build great web-based applications. AIR is the ideal platform for building these types of web applications that are robust and powerful."

Shame I think, Adobe have always made great apps and AIR is the perfect platform to create a real on/offline experience for the office tools user. I think they should go for it, innovation and experimentation never hurts (just look at Google).

Open up and standardise those social networks!

It's a constant pain having so many profiles on so many different social networks and having to remember credentials and keep them up to date. Staying in touch with different people on different networks, getting requests from Linkedin, Facebook and Bebo, forgetting who's on which network when you want to contact someone, the list of frustrations is endless.

To that end, there's a really good article on the BBC here which discusses how desirable interoperability would be between social networks.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a social networking standard that enabled interactions, open standards, open API's, open data exchange between the networks. Developers would be able to create single sign-in applications that could manage all your profiles as one. Someone could create an on/offline app with Adobe AIR that could allow profile changes, photo uploads etc all offline and synchronising when connected. The possibilities would be endless, of course the privacy issues could be too!

Adobe mulling use of AIR to create office suite

Interesting news out today that Adobe may be considering jumping into the office productivity market in the future. Now that they have the Adobe AIR runtime platform they have a perfect framework for creating desktop apps that have online connectivity. That would seem a natural framework for creating an on/offline synchronising suite of office tools.

Adobe AIR is a fascinating product as it gives you all the power and potential of the internet right on your desktop. Maybe Google will buy Adobe and port it's Apps, Docs and Gmail onto the AIR platform (as I blogged about yesterday)?