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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.

19 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Market isn't closed... by WED+Fan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The market isn't closed, but really, there is not a single office suite that seriously competes with MS Office. Any MAJOR company that has tried has BLED money...and lost.

    --
    Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
    1. Re:Market isn't closed... by WED+Fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The market isn't closed, but really, there is not a single office suite that seriously competes with MS Office. Any MAJOR company that has tried has BLED money...and lost.

      Modded troll because the truth hurts? Name one that even approaches half the market penetration. There aren't. I'm not saying its right, I'm not saying Office, especially the new version, is good, I'm just saying that this is a very difficult market to enter, even for a major company.

      --
      Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
    2. Re:Market isn't closed... by Penguinisto · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Name one that even approaches half the market penetration. There aren't. I'm not saying its right, I'm not saying Office, especially the new version, is good, I'm just saying that this is a very difficult market to enter, even for a major company.

      Just because one does not exist does not mean that one will not exist.

      Apple was once the established market leader for PC's. Not today. Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".

      I'm not saying that any old app suite will simply come in and stomp an established market leader, but I am saying that I wouldn't be so sure that what dominates today will dominate tomorrow. Even MS Word had to overcome Word Perfect's market penetration, and WP was pretty damned powerful for what it did back in the day.

      /P

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    3. Re:Market isn't closed... by Arthur+Grumbine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Is this move anything more than an empty threat in response to Microsoft's very recent nasty surprise? Seriously.

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      Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
    4. Re:Market isn't closed... by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box". Not to steal your thunder, but I think you've forgotten that the PS2 is STILL far and away the best selling console.
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      Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    5. Re:Market isn't closed... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ok then: Sega had the best selling console and dominated the market, but then they brought out the Saturn whilst upstart newcomer Sony the audacity to build and market something called the "playstation".

      Remember the Saturn... no? Exactly.

    6. Re:Market isn't closed... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When Apple was the leader it had a market share closer to 15% because there were so many other strong competitors. IBM won just because their platform was the most open, allowing for PC Clones compete in the same software market space.

      Sony Playstation while dominate still wasn't invincible high Nentendo had a strong competitive advantage and even Sega was enough to be a threat, when the XBox came out it didn't beat sony until the 360 where Sony just royally screwed up.

      For replacing Office there is a major hurdle. First Microsoft Office became the dominate Office Suite and has been invested in my most companies... if a Company is going to use an other office suite it will need to be 100% compatible. Not this 99% compatability where 3 times a year you get a document which blowes up in your face and you need to put tail between your legs and beg your supplier or worse your customer to save it in a different format. For the 3 times a year that could cost the company far more then the cost of Office Professional.

      That being said Adobe has the best chance of doing this only because they are large enough to push this, have enough IP agreements with Microsoft to get a good compatibility of Office files. And mostly postive feeling from the public. Most people are indifferent or like Adobe not to many people (with the exception of Open Source Zealots) really dislike Adobe. But still it will be an uphill battle with no margin of error.

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      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    7. Re:Market isn't closed... by hazem · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple was once the established market leader for PC's. Not today.

      Apple's not a good example here. Apple was a leader in a small immature market that was growing rapidly. It's easy to be displaced in such a market because there are so many new customers who don't need to switch from one product to another.

      The Office App market is pretty mature with well-entrenched players and anyone who wants a pretty good office app can get one (even legitimately for free). You would have quite a bit better than say, Open Office, since that's free and pretty good. And you'd have to be so astoundingly good that you could get a lot of people to actually make the effort to switch from MS Office to the point where Microsoft can't break your app by making you incompatible with them. And Microsoft has the huge advantage of being entrenched in many large corporations and governments, who are not likely to quickly change their infrastructure to try something hot and new. Many aren't even upgrading their version of Office for fear of breaking existing processes with slight incompatibilities and the huge expense and effort of retraining.

      I'm not saying it won't happen, but there's a lot working against a new Office App vendor in their efforts to become profitable. And even Word Perfect, as good as it was, was only dominating a market that was rapidly growing.

    8. Re:Market isn't closed... by Nossie · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Thats all we need...

      Lets swap one monopoly for another :-|

    9. Re:Market isn't closed... by jmyers · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "I was a WP user. But, the boys in Orem let the product lanquish and the Corel ignored it for too many years."

      Even so that is not what killed WP. It was killed because of price. People want cheep/free (see previous ./ article). WP was ~$200 and you could buy MS Word "competitive upgrade" for $50. Everybody opted for Word because it was cheap. Once they had 50%+ market share they removed WP compatibility from the default install and the rest of the holdouts switched to Word so they cold exchange documents.

      The other one was Lotus 123. Lotus was $200-300 and you could buy Quattro Pro for $50 competitive upgrade. People started going to Quattro in droves and then Lotus won a lawsuit over look and feel and basically put Quattro Pro out of business. By then excel was available for $50 upgrade and everyone went to it rather than back to Lotus.

      Then the deal was sealed and MS owns the desktop productivity market.

      When/if MS makes Office hard/impossible to pirate people will download OO in droves.

    10. Re:Market isn't closed... by Frenchy_2001 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Apple was once the established market leader for PC's. Not today. Sony Playstations once dominated the console market... yet there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".
      And that audacity has cost them 2 Billions of dollars per iterations ($4B so far...).
      The fact that you can buy market share in an established procedure, the problem is to actually create a product that is competitive enough and cheaper enough to displace the entrenched competition. I would not use the xbox as such an example. So far, they are trading market space for money. In the same vein, Nintendo did the opposite: their last 2 generations have been told to have "lost" the console war, yet Nintendo made money hand over fist. They traded a bit of market share for a lot of profit.

      How will Adobe's try act? Who knows? They certainly have the know-how and the mind share for office programs. Will they be ready to "invest" heavily and trade dollars for market share? Or will they get such a product that it can succeed on its own merit?

    11. Re:Market isn't closed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      you get a document which blowes up in your face and you need to put tail between your legs and beg your supplier or worse your customer to save it in a different format.

      Whoa.. you're letting suppliers and customers send you executable scripts, which you then give to the program loader from MS called "Office" and then, you execute the scripts?

      Just how many botnets is your company now participating in?

      Using MS Office save formats for inter-company communication, is total madness.

      "But everyone's doing it," you say. Well, if everyone loaded and executed a virus, would you do it too? Oh wait, I think we know the answer.

      Damn, sometimes I realize just what a sitting duck this world is. The internet is an absolutely clean and benevolent place, compared to what is possible, if only someone were actually out to make a mess of things.

  2. If they are really smart. by AltGrendel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They will have a version for Window, Mac OS-X, and Linux.

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    - Douglas Adams

  3. Then again ... by UncleWilly · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "According to Wired, Adobe may launch its own office-application suite,
    they may not.
  4. Clippy v 2.0? by Critical+Facilities · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Buzzword can import and export Microsoft Word documents, it boasts built-in sharing and collaboration features, and it has a rich, animated user interface

    Great, an animated user interface. As if work doesn't suck enough.
  5. File Format? by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The most important question for any word processor is "what file formats can it read/write?"

    Word processors all have to read/write at least MS Word .doc format. Because most documents we exchange are in that format. They usually add their own format, for the same reasons MS invented its own: to lock you in to that app, even years after the reasons you originally used it might not have any value at all.

    They'll all claim that their own new app features can be stored only in their own new format. But that's a bunch of crap. They should all read/write both .doc and XML (with a public DTD and descriptive specs). Postscript/PDF would be nice, especially if Adobe lets people import PDF for editing.

    But PDF is just another bell/whistle. What we need is a standard, open storage/exchange format. If Adobe commits to that, they just might have a winner. Otherwise, they shouldn't waste our time with yet another format we'll need to interconvert all the time, instead of productive work.

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    make install -not war

  6. They can bundle it with flash... by catbutt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In fact they don't really have to bundle much at all, just include a minimal app that mostly runs off the net.

    I'm usually not a fan of bundling, but I'd forgive them for this since it's about time someone hits microsoft with their own tricks.

  7. Re:Rich Platform? Then port Photoshop by gmac63 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Funny that you mentioned porting to Linux.

    Back in '97 I used Photoshop AND Illustrator on an SGI running IRIX.

    Its portable. They've done it. Just not for Linux. :-(

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    INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
  8. Re:Not there. Yet? by xra · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, but that's the kind of stuff big execs like to see..