October 3, 2007

Adobe Acquires Buzzword: A Different Word Procoessor

Internet News writes The company on Monday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, developer of the Buzzword word processor. Buzzword is built on Adobe's AIR technology, formerly known as Apollo, and Adobe's Flex technology.

It will work online or offline, in a browser or on a desktop, on Windows, Macintosh or Linux, and provide the exact same experience regardless of platform or connection status. Adobe is promising that Buzzword will be the next generation in online, collaborative document creation and management.

What does this mean to you?

This means that your choices for the TOOLS you can use to communicate are expanding. Sure, so much of the media thinks this is a battle about Microsoft Office or not - and to some degree it is.

But the real war, right now, is a war of CHOICE. It's a battle of what tools will you use to extend your communication platform on the Internet and Intranet. That's the battle.

Adobe has a range of software solutions for creating content - be it web content or PDFs. With the purchase of Virtual Ubiquity it's adding another layer of services and products to its already broad platform.

Google is often seen as a challenger to Microsoft, but Adobe is a rising "start" of a challenger.

It sells software - tons of it - just like Microsoft does. Although software as a service is "sexy" and growing in use, Google is only making a small bit of money from it.

A company like Adobe, on the other hand, is already making a lot of money from its product sales of content creation software. With Buzzword in its sales tool kit, it can probably leverage this new tool more than Google can.

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