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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.
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.
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.
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.