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Adobe May Launch Office Rival

Posted by kdawson on from the now-it-gets-interesting dept.

Ulysees writes "According to Wired, Adobe may launch its own office-application suite, taking it into direct competition with Microsoft. Mike Downey, group manager for platform evangelism at Adobe, said: 'Though we have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office productivity-software market, considering that we have built this platform that makes it easy to build rich applications that run on both the desktop and the browser, I certainly wouldn't rule anything like that out.'" One example of what such Adobe Web-and-desktop apps could look like is provided by the Buzzword word processor, now in a closed beta. Adobe has invested in the startup developing this software.

4 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Adobe says they'll support Linux ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the Wired article:

    Perhaps even more important is that AIR applications are platform-agnostic. They operate almost exactly the same on both Windows and Mac platforms with only small differences, keyboard shortcuts being the most obvious. Adobe expects a Linux version of the AIR runtime to be completed in the coming months.

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    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  2. Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years ago by iguana · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anyone remember Novell's office suite?

    Bought WordPerfect.
    Bought Quatro Pro.
    Bought UNIX.
    Bought Digital Research (DR DOS).

    Ruined them all.

    Rumor at the time was Ray Noorda was actually a shill for Microsoft. In the span of a few years Noorda/Novell managed to buy up all reasonably credible competition to MS. And ruined them all.

    Learn from history, Adobe. Don't try to bag the bear in its own den. That's just stupid.

  3. Re:Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years a by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wordperfect, Quattro Pro and DR DOS were already essentially dead when Novell bought them. I remember hoping that Novell could bring them back from the dead when I first heard that they had bought them, but it was too late/Novell didn't have a clue how to make it happen. I am not sure which of those two was the bigger issue, but Novell didn't destroy those products, their original creators had already done so (with a lot of help from MS).

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    The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
  4. Re:Not there. Yet? by aaronl · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hopefully I can knock one of those right off your list. I use this to do the "Text to Columns" feature that OO doesn't come with stock.

    http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=87718&package_id=104183

    OpenOffice does have VBA support, but it doesn't work for everything. Most sane scripts should run... anything an Excel "Wizzard" did probably is going to have a problem, though. There's a bunch of info on the OO site about what parts of the language they do support, and what's planned. Info on that at: http://vba.openoffice.org/