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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.
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.
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They will have a version for Window, Mac OS-X, and Linux.
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- 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.
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Adobe's Office Product Suite will include the following applications: -Buzzword Word Processor -Internet Net Browser -SlideShow Slide Maker
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.
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?
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
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?
We need beautiful documents more than we need beautiful interfaces...
The unwashed masses tend to confuse beautiful with lots of clipart, font styles and colors, bolding and italicizing rather than functional and effective though.
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
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.
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.
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';
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!
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.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.