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Adobe May Launch Office Rival
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.
Especially considering that a few weeks ago there was an article here on /. talking about Microsoft making a go at the graphics tool market (putting it in competition with the Adobe CS products). I wonder if this is like an "F.U." from Adobe. A corporate pissing contest of sorts?
Eek!
Maybe for home / school / small business users. But not large "enterprise" users. OpenOffice's spreadsheet application has a lot of ground to cover before it even approaces Excell for power users.
OpenOffice has a lot of potential, but also a lot of issues. It's convienent for OSS proponents to ignore / gloss over / minimize OpenOffice's flaws, but this doesn't work in business.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Actually, the Adobe brand itself could make such a product compete with MS office, IMO. If they use ODF and include compatibility with their other expensive office apps (PageMaker?), I bet they could take a huge chunk, even if their .doc converters are only as good as the ones in OOo. Obviously their office suite will include that curiously often withheld feature, export to PDF.
Of course, they will never do this. But I bet it would work.
It's written in Flash, so that's pretty much a given especially considering that Adobe expects to have a version of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for Linux in the coming months.
The real questions are 1) Will it support OpenDocument Format, and if so, how good will its support be? and 2) Will it support OOXML, and if so, how good will its support be?
If these two questions are answered in the affirmative, then Adobe's office suite may be at least an OpenOffice.org or StarOffice killer, and possibly a Microsoft Office killer.
My blog
Personally, I'm not as concerned with the platform as I am with the document format. MS Office's proprietary binary formats are such a drag. If only they'd use some sort of "open document" format. You know, where the details of the format had been decided upon by a committee of experts, the implementation was human readable, and it wasn't owned by a single corporate entity. One where you wouldn't have to be worried about broken compatibility every time the app was revved, one where any other enterprising developer(s) could create a competing product without having to reverse engineer anything. What a nice world that would be. What are the odds?
This is the last thing the world needs.
What people should really be looking for is quality of typesetting. We need beautiful documents more than we need beautiful interfaces...which isn't to say that the monstrosity in TFA is beautiful.
I did a comparison recently between Word and InDesign. 187 words. First two paragraphs of A Tale of Two Cities. Two column 8.5x11. InDesign was two full lines tighter than Word. That's ridiculous. And that was _after_ I tweaked Word's leading and column width, the defaults for which are pretty ridiculous.
I have so little patience for the typical Word doc. There's no way to rationalize such poor typesetting. Word handles orphans and widows very poorly too.
People don't know to look for this stuff, which is why they put up with it
The spec can be as open as it likes. It's so badly written, and missing crucial information, that I defy anyone to actually make a functioning third-party shop that could actually write a comprehensive OOXML-compliant office suite. That is, after all, precisely what Microsoft wants; all the appearances of an open spec, with none of the inconvenience of anyone being able to write a competing program that could use OOXML.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't say competition is bad, I would never touch this thing. I remove their PDF reader and use Foxit for my family members, I won't if they'll make it as bloated as their PDF reader. Not even Open Office comes close to Microsoft Office for power users. I worked with two businesses doing VERY complex stuff inside Microsoft Office and I tell you, Say whatever you want about Microsoft but that is no easy task to compete with Microsoft Office.
If they can't get a simple page renderer to work well, what are the odds they can do a whole slew of apps that don't totally suck?
Adobe expects a Linux version of the AIR runtime to be completed in the coming months.
Adobe's always limped along when it came to linux development. From what I've seen of their flash support, I'm not expecting anything much when it comes to air compatibility. Flash 9 for linux has been in beta how long now, and this is after a huge wait with no flash 8 and a buggy flash 7. Given that air's already available for windows and osx, but not linux, I don't see much reason to believe anything's changed.
Everything will be taken away from you.
There's two reasons for this I think. First, MSOffice is generally perceived as "good enough". There's not enough pain for most users to look beyond what gets offered as part of a PC/Laptop package. Even if Adobe's package was available through Dell's website (for example), what would be the incentive? The second reason I see is issues of compatibility and collaboration. If I did choose Adobe, I'd need to know that I can share documents with MSOffice users. If there's *any* doubt on being able to share documents, it's easier for me to just pick what I know will be compatible - MSOffice.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
What programis on more computers than any other? No it's not Windows OS, or MS office. it's Acrobat and Flash. These are big binaries. For all you know Adobe might have already deployed their word processor to your computer in the last Flash release.
Thus overnight Adobe could activate a word processing suite on nearly every computer and it would be cross platform, running natively.
They could succeed where others have failed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Right. People have a tendency to think that Microsoft and Apple are the big competitors because Apple is producing an OS, but I think Adobe is in many ways a potential competitor to both Apple and Microsoft. If I were running Adobe, one of my big fears would be Apple and Microsoft developing their own in-house competitors to my software. It's already happened in some cases, with Apple producing Final Cut, and Microsoft trying to produce competitors to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the PDF file format.
Of course, it can be hard to compete with an application that is somehow tied to the OS. I also have seen many situations where people would be willing to switch to Linux except for the fact that they needed a particular Adobe application. Therefore, if I were running Adobe, I would probably have a top-secret project for making my own OS and DE, perhaps based on Linux/Gnome. If Adobe could produce their own platform that offered Adobe apps, an office suite, e-mail, and other generic stuff that people need, it would provide them with an independence from Apple/Microsoft that they don't currently have.
And yet, 2007 has raised the bar in terms of UI, features and intuitiveness that everybody else will be playing catch-up for years to come.
If 2007 has raised the bar then the bar is set so low I'd have to limbo dance to get under it.
The new UI is the least intuitive I've seen in a long time, 97-2003 might not have been brilliant but at least people know where everything is after 6 and more years of training on it and using it.
I had it for the NeXT. We also used it at the book publishing division on Sparcstations. Powerfull application for building ubber complex docs and books. Horrible at anything else. There's a great tale when NeXT tried to sell a bunch of computers to Target in Minn., and they couldn't touch Quark. The challege was to build a 10 page - graphic heavy - weekend insert (the whole point of the program). With a Framemaker EXPERT - they couldn't get it done in 4 hours. This is something you can do in an hour or less (depending on source-content prep) in Quark or Indesign.
Oh did I mention that FrameMaker had an interface that emerged from the 7th circle of hell after a late-night incantation in a graveyard? You should have seen the sacrafical virgins. Not slashdotters - I'm talking WOMEN!