Adobe takes aim at MS Office with 'Buzzword'

Adobe Systems Inc. announced on Monday that it has acquired Waltham, Massachusetts-based startup Virtual Ubiquity and its ground-breaking online word processor, Buzzword, apparently trying to take aim at Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous Office Suite.

At the Adobe Max 2007 developer and designer conference today in Chicago, the world’s largest maker of graphic design software Adobe announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with the 11-person start-up Virtual Ubiquity and Buzzword, a web based word processor built using Flex 2.

With its latest acquisition, Adobe has joined a crowded field of Web application providers that already includes Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Glide Write, ajaxWrite, ThinkFree, which are competing with Microsoft’s Office software suite.

The acquisition further confirms Adobe's commitment to nurture a vibrant ecosystem for rich Internet application (RIA) development that delivers breakthrough experiences built on Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime).

Virtual Ubiquity’s Flash-based online word processor would compliment Adobe's current online document services, Acrobat Connect and Create PDF Online.

“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. Buzzword will build on that leadership and enable fundamental improvements in how people collaborate on documents,” said David Mendels, senior Vice President, Business Productivity Business Unit at Adobe. “At the same time, it is an exciting showcase of the power of Adobe’s RIA technology that raises the bar for the quality of experience people should expect in their applications.”

Built with Adobe Flex software and runs in the Adobe Flash™ Player, the elegant online word processor Buzzword provides individuals with the capability to work together to create high quality, page perfect documents. It enables greater document quality, outstanding typography, page layout controls, and robust support for integrated graphics, regardless of the browser or device.

Adobe also has added a file sharing service to its catalog of online offerings. The new service, called Share, is a free file sharing service for publishing and sharing documents online. The Share service, which is still in testing mode, provides individuals and companies a way to host and distribute documents on the web, allowing people to invite others to view and access documents stored by Adobe. It also includes a set of REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs to let developers integrate document data into other applications.

San Jose-based Adobe's most-used products are the Adobe Reader, for reading PDF document files, and Flash, which is one of the byproducts of Adobe's 2005 acquisition of Web design tools maker Macromedia, and showcases Internet video on sites such as YouTube and Amazon.com.

According to Adobe, more than 98% of all computers are loaded with both signature products.

Of its stand-alone products, the biggest seller is Photoshop, which is used by photographers, film producers and video game designers for special effects and image manipulation, and sells for $649. Adobe sells the consumer version, Photoshop Elements for $99.

Adobe’s latest move adds fuel to its efforts to overtake world’s largest software maker Microsoft in the field of online offerings. Microsoft and Adobe, each shooting for a bigger share of software that can create and serve up clips, had unveiled their video-playing software, Silverlight, Adobe Media Player, respectively few months ago at the NBA show.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is all ready with its own document collaboration service called Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing Office documents online.

The acquisition, still subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to close by the end of November 2007. However, terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company.