Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
They will have a version for Window, Mac OS-X, and Linux.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Adobe's Office Product Suite will include the following applications: -Buzzword Word Processor -Internet Net Browser -SlideShow Slide Maker
I don't see this as a viable marketing strategy. Unless Adobe can secure a good contract with a large-scale hardware retailer like Dell to have their program pre-installed on new desktops/laptops, "Adobe Office" will go the way of Netscape, like the many other pieces of software that have tried to provide competition for Microsoft's pack-ins.
Inserting [insert witty signature here] here does not constitute a witty signature.
It would be nice to see Adobe, which does have a wide reputation through the Acrobat brand, give it a crack. MS Office has become stale and overblown, so anyone else is welcome to try. Hey, they might even release a Linux version and bundle it with those Dell Ubuntu PCs.
Microsoft's trying to take out Adobe with Silverlight, so why not try and compete with Microsoft in other ways? I have no doubt that a full fledged suite of Office software from Adobe would be great.
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!
It will take 25 minutes to start and will ask if you wanna update evry time you uses it.
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.
Ok, for what its worth, I think Adobe is the biggest monopoly in computer history (Image editing with Photoshop, PostScript which has been freely emulated without fear of reprisal). Mind you, they do not seem to practice monopolistic power, so therefor I really like Adobe. The compete in an apparent, honest fashion: They have fantastic products.
That said, got it Adobe. I would consider buying Adobe Office, even over OOo (which I know is free). Adobe makes good stuff and in most cases is the de facto standard.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
Writing a competitive office suite is not a quick little task you can knock out over the weekend. Nor is MS the only target. You've also got to compete with free in Open Office/Google Star Office. This is not an easy market to enter even if you are Adobe. Word Perfect Office failed in there a while back.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Bullwinkle: Hey Rocky, watch me pull an Office suite rival out of my Hat.
Rocky: "gain? that trick never works
Bullwinkle: This time for sure. Nothing up my sleeves...PRESTO!
Adobe_Killer_Office_App:
Bullwinkle: Guess I should have stuck to bloatware readers, Google taskbar and Kinkos.
Rocky: Now here's something you'll really like.
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.
Great, an animated user interface. As if work doesn't suck enough.
If anyone can make a more bloated, resource-hogging, and system buggering piece of software than MS, it's Adobe.
Could be the best thing to ever happen to open office!
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?
Why create applications for Microsoft OSes?
Why create any application that has any level of market penetration, on a platform created by a company that is in direct competition with your product, or at least can enter into competition at any time.
Seriously! We've seen how it works. Mozilla - IE, Word Perfect - Word, 123 - Excel, Quicken - Money, Notes - Exchange, NDS - ADS.
While the lure of 95% market share OS is strong, I would think that in the long run, it is futile; The Borg will assimilate your customers.
If I were an application developer, I wouldn't even try to make a Windows version.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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 most important question for any word processor is "what file formats can it read/write?"
.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.
.doc and XML (with a public DTD and descriptive specs). Postscript/PDF would be nice, especially if Adobe lets people import PDF for editing.
Word processors all have to read/write at least MS Word
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
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.
--
make install -not war
I really miss Word Perfect. It was much more intuitive than Word.
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?
platform
Previously meant:
A combination of hardware + OS + tools that could produce interoperable applications.
Now means:
Any two pieces of software that work together or have the same look and feel
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).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The reason I don't like Office is it's buggy, counter-intuitive and expensive. The same might be said for any Adobe app. If another company were to jump into this market, I'd be way more interested. IMHO, Apple is doing a pretty good job along these lines with iWork.
I hope they don't support .doc or blob-in-XML. That would really dint Microsoft format lock-in, even with a moderate user base.
If I were a shareholder in Aobe, I'd be ticked at them wasting money fighting Microsoft. Microsoft's monopoly cannot be reasonably defeated by better products.
MSFT will decide to softpedal Silverlight. And Adobe will let the "office suite" remain a vaporware. Like some underhanded deal that must have happened between Intuit and MSFT about Quicken.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
The very few Adobe products I have dealt with (Acrobat/Reader, Flash) are just, for lack of a better word, crap. Adobe Downloader? Why, oh God why??
Seriously though, they seem to be an incredibly irresponsible company. I *do* give them major props for porting Flash to Linux, but there is still much to be desired with that, and they seem to have done it and merely let it alone, with no future improvements until Flash 12 is out most likely. Flash 9 is still the one thing that crashes my browser in Linux. And it crashes often.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I've had a discussion with my boss yesterday over the seeming lack of alternatives to MS Project. For a start, I've used Project on and off over the last 5 years for various small tasks and always found it was not that user friendly and not very intuitive, (like not being able to drag the Gant chart around, or drag and drop resources into tasks. AJAX style)
ah fuck, i'm a tard. While looking up info for the rest of my hate for MS Project, I came across a list of other project applications here
I'm off to try these out. But I can say it would be nice if a simple and user friendly project tool was bundled as part of the office suite....
Yes, I know you can use the GIMP, but Photoshop is industry standard
And anyone who uses both of these products knows why too. Don't get me wrong, I use GIMP and for a free application it's actually very nice but at the same time it's certainly no Photoshop.
It may just help those companies move to Linux that much faster, and isn't THAT a good thing?
For whom? Adobe probably doesn't give a damn. In fact, given their lack of support for Linux my guess is that they don't give a damn at all. It's pretty obvious that Adobe either doesn't feel that they have anything to gain by supporting Linux or they're hoping to move to more of a web style app that will allow them to not worry about the who OS war wasteland.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I know Web 2.0 is full of buzzwords, but actually naming a product Buzzword is brilliant. Finally truth in advertising.
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.
A way to have the intuitive easy to use GUI of Photoshop spread to applications I use more often.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
What I'm saying is that the timing is not coincidental. Office is getting long in the tooth and Microsoft does not seem to be ready to make a serious rewrite of it. I think these companies have all decided that the time to begin to attack Office is near and they're gearing up to fight Microsoft on the productivity software front. I think we're about to enter a new era productivity software application wars.
Depending on their motivation, as someone else said is this a big FU to Microsoft? If so wouldn't it make much more sense to start investing in Open Office to cover the deficiencies. Significantly cheaper and more effective then starting something up from scratch. OTOH if they have the resources to do it ground up and not die in the process more power to them
>> it's certainly no Photoshop.
That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your individual requirements.
Yes Virginia, individual users have their own requirements.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
Adobe reader is the slowest, most bloated thing ive ever seen. Never.
I would love to see a viable Office rival. It would only help stimulate what is a pretty much closed shop and it would keep the innovation train moving. It's going to take a massive R&D budget to even scratch the surface of the domination that MS Office has. I have a horrible feeling that Adobe will try and build some Flash-based memory hogging monster that will be drenched in eye-candy and probably require a browser to make work - urrrgh. But if they could improve on Acrobat and make it more Office-like, who knows, we might only need .pdf for reading and creating documents in the future.
Microsoft's biggest problem in trying to market Office 2007 is of course, Office 2003, XP and 2000. All of the previous versions following Office '97 are simply 'good enough' for most people. 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. Even Google has saddled up with Sun in their latest GooglePack.
Adobe will have to make some key decisions if it attempts to enter this space like:- will they make their products work across other platforms other than Windows/Mac? Infact, how do they win over OpenOffice fans who get their kicks for free? And given that the free, similarly featured OpenOffice product has not yet made a dent in the enterprise market space, how are they going to do better? They could always start by offering the Creative Suite for 1/4 price when purchased with their Office product. That would temp me to take a look at least.Now every time I open a document I will get 15 second pause then a screen asking me to upgrade to the latest version!
I fought the good fight for a decade, defending linux as a grad student and for the first couple years of my first real job.
My experience was that there was rarely a perfect compatibility between MS Office applications and StarOffice etc. in linux, and that was enough for me to finally abandon in favor of XP + Office. It was a sad day but was definitely the right business decision for me at the time.
I have many friends that use MacOS and run the Mac version of Office, but even that has displayed some quirky behavior at inopportune times (PowerPoint presentations).
In conclusion, I wouldn't use the Linux angle as a winning angle for Adobe's new application. Especially given the bloated applications like Acrobat and Illustrator that I've abandoned in frustration years ago.
-- Lust
<rant>
And each suite license will cost $3,000
Mod me troll if you like, but if Adobe's latest releases of Acrobat reader are any indication of how this conceptual suite will be released, I'd rather take my chances with MS, or even better, open office.
Using Acrobat Reader 8 as a benchmark: Acrobat Reader 8 takes too long to launch, pesters you with some update that usually just adds to the program's bloat of unnecessary features, and to top it off, 8 sometimes "page tears" when you scroll -- a bug that keeps reappearing that prevents things from being displayed properly on several of my machines. Switching tasks or minimize/restore is the only fix I've found so far.
Aside from this any full-blown software from them just seems to be way overpriced to begin with.
No thanks, Adobe
</rant>
"How about working on making the free PDF writer stable enough for daily browser use first?"
I'll bet all the people who gripe about this are running MS Windows versions. I never have such problems but then, I'm using Safari on Mac OS X and Firefox on Linux.
Reread the quote this whole article is based on again. The Adobe guy said, "...we have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office-productivity software market." Everything else in the article is the Wired writer fantasizing with one hand down his pants about how it might happen. Let's all pull up our chairs in a circle and join him.
Yay an even slower loading version of office!
So Adobe, a company known for bloatware, is going to enter a field dominated by bloatware?? Why?
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
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!
Back in about 15 minutes ago I used Photoshop on OSX.
So yeah, it appears to be possible to get it to work on OSs other than Windows.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219 [osnews.com]m ent_id=226313 [osnews.com]m ent_id=226315 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&com
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&com
Note that format compatibility is rarely mentioned here if at all. It's the features, big and small, that make you productive or just allow you to get the job done.
And that is to *beat MS Office*. Really, everything else so far has only *imitated* Office, and usually it's been Office 2000 at that. Why would you want an alternative when you could have the real thing? The only solution is to make something better. Take all the complaints about Office (Word, Excel, Outlook), and fix them. Improve on it. Make it lightweight, with a small footprint. Make it compatible with everything, but have it offer more, or do something better or faster. Make the interface better so it's easier to do what you need to do. You're never going to kill Office by imitating it.
So there ya go. Now where's my venture capital?
Oh yeah, on top of beating MS Office, that includes Outlook and Exchange. And solid integration between ALL of the apps. Just making a replacement for Word won't work, even if it's better. You need to replace and improve Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint. And Exchange.
Yeah, Adobe has their work cut out for them. My money would be on Apple, especially if they come out with an Exchange alternative. Why aren't they doing this?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
....i hope it uses a proprietrary, closed standard for the default file type, incompatible with oasis odf and all ms formats
I've been working for an office for many years, running Office on PCs. We echanged Word documents with other companies, also running PCs. When talking to a client on the phone, it turned out that they layout had gone haywire anyway. What's on my page 8 at the bottom, is at their top page 9. That is just from opening, not from messing with the document. Word is not compatible with itself, be it due to different versions of Word, or perhaps due to different versions of Windows. I've my own company now, use Word (aarghh), and know that these situations don't happen just because I use Word on a Mac.
For my company, I'll take a look at what Adobe comes up with, but if they use a proprietary format instead of ODF or (editable) PDF, it is unlikely to get much further attention.
Bert
We are a billion dollar a year company. We looked at Star Office and Open Office. We are not going to switch to this to save $100,000 because it doesn't open the Excel spreadsheets our customers make us fill out to get their business.
We are definitely not going to switch to any other competitor if this problem remains. We will spend $100,000 to upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007 just because one decent sized customer has switched and we can't open their documents.
It all comes down to the bottom line.
That being said, I use Open Office personally on several of my own computers and don't use Word/Excel/PowerPoint. With the license we have of Office, I am granted the right to install it at home also. For me, the security vulnerabilities don't make it worth it. Open Office patches are much fewer.
that you want them to be smart. They keep trying to limit themselves to MS's backyard and then are surprised when MS comes after their revenue stream. Adobe has not shown themselves to be smart.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
would this be only limited to microsloth OS or would it also include unix based OS as well?
Seriously...how many companies have tried to take on Microsoft in word processing/spreadsheets etc? What makes Adobe think they have a better chance of success than Novell, Corel etal? Flash? AIR? Yeah...right. Seriously, Adobe is doing a halfway decent job of competing with Microsoft as the platform level with Flex/Flash and maybe AIR. Why not stick to that knitting before they decide to expand their ambitions? Maybe it's because they know something the rest of us don't regarding their ability to seriously compete as a platform provider.
How many workplace comedies are they going to throw out on the airwaves? First there was the British version, then the yanks adopted it with their own cast and stories. Now AMC has an 'office' set in the early sixties called "Madmen." What does Adobe think they're going to bring to the table? Will Ferrell, perhaps? That, I think, is the only thing that could establish Adobe's Office as a competitor to the Steve Carell show.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
How about something like the GoBe Productive suite which has been sitting on shelves of its most recent owners for the last few years now?
Those three times a year are most likely you using either O2K or 2003 and are sent documents from Office 2007. And if you worked in an office you would realize that that happens far more often than 3 times a year.
So how is contacting your supplier/customer and asking them to resave in O2K format any different than asking them to save in something a bit more universal?
Seriously, if you can't realize it's the same thing, different programs, you really don't have much experience with document exchange.
I like the new layout, as well as the new features, as compared to 2003. I suppose I'm not an Office power user, so I'm not particularly privy to any drawbacks to 2007, but from an average-user perspective, I really like Office 2007, which is more than I can say for Vista.
I am asking about marketshare, not quality.
Maybe dreamweaver has over-taken frontpage?
Apologies for the OT, but a lot of people seem to be upset about the (lack of) quality in Adobe Reader, so I thought I'd quickly mention my favorite alternative: Foxit Reader. Works with embedded and desktop versions of Windows and Linux (no sign of a Mac port, sorry) and doesn't require rebooting or anything when installing or updating. It starts instantly and has a much lower footprint. It doesn't have a browser plugin in the usual sense (.pdf files open in another window, which is fine with me at least) but embedded PDFs will display correctly. For the icing on the cake, according to Secunia it doesn't seem like anybody has found any vulnerabilities in its rendering or Javascript support yet (such vulnerabilities are one of the biggest driving forces behind Adobe Reader updates).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I've spent the entire day trying to find out why Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on one of my client's machines hangs at random points while rendering. And they constantly have problems with Adobe Premiere crashes when doing video and film conversion projects.
It's ridiculous. Now I'm doing a defrag and if that doesn't help, we have to uninstall every frickin' application on the box to see what might be interfering. If that doesn't work, it's reinstall the whole goddamn box - which will take another day, given that we have to put that QuickBooks crap on the box which is more bloated shit.
Adobe software is unmitigated SHIT. Anybody who'd buy an office suite from them deserves to.
And don't even get me started on their (or Macrovision's) fucked up license management software that dumps randomly-named services in your Services list, triggering Windows Defender messages to the Event Log suggesting "spyware".
Adobe is like every other stupid-ass application company in existence today - selling "featuritis" software loaded with crap nobody wants that doesn't work and makes you jump through hoops to use it, while charging you an arm and a leg for this shit. Adobe, Intuit, Symantec, Microsoft, HP and their 750MB of printer software - all a bunch of fucking morons who need to be put out of business so people with computers can get some fucking work done rather than debugging their shit all day.
Can you tell I'm slightly irritated?
Adobe - that's what their brains are made of.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Last time i heard, photoshop was ported to Windows, not the other way around. It's OSX native. It would be easier to port it to *nix than it would be to port it to Winblows.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
that nobody ever changed the world by saying "nothing ever changes". I wish Adobe well. I get annoyed to no end with Microsoft Office - and people pay a lot of money for that annoying pile.
LOL compare them before Adobe swallowed Frame? NeXTSTATION? Sparcstation? These are not late 90s platforms. I'm talking circa 1991-1992.
They were too niche for their applications. Granted it wasn't until the mid to late 90s before Quark could handle indexing on an ubber scale, but geez. You LIKED that god-awful interface?
Adobe had a much better product than Front Page. They didn't like the heat from MS, so they just abandoned it. I wish it were possible to sue companies to post source code when they walk away from a product.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
With any luck Adobe and Microsoft will put each other out of business.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So, basically, you're saying it's "just good enough" to pass. That's great. I'll pass.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Look at the story title! Have the Eds finally got bored of the oh so tacky "[Company] releases [Product] Killer!!" line?
I like to think so!
Goodnight London.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
i don't need to learn ANOTHER office suite, or worse yet, teach and repair it. My Lusers are very smart people (laser engineers) and they can barely handle Word.
Get an open document format that doesn't lose formatting from one platform to another. Then we can have infinite office suites that are compliant with one standard. That would be fine with me. But ohgodno, not another office suite!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
In such a case, it's usually best to install converters, if Office 2007 is not yet deployed. I think many people (and perhaps IT departments) forget this.
Buying one retail Office 2007 for converting documents in-house in one of the computers dedicated for this is also a solution.