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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.

16 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.

    --
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    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 twistedcubic · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. 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

      --
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    4. 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.

      --
      Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
    5. 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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    6. 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.

  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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    1. Re:If they are really smart. by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
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  3. Adobe says they'll support Linux ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 5, Informative
    From the Wired article:

    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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  4. Not there. Yet? by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If in terms of quality/featues, I'd say OpenOffice is quite a valid competator.

    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.

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    1. Re:Not there. Yet? by aaronl · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hopefully I can knock one of those right off your list. I use this to do the "Text to Columns" feature that OO doesn't come with stock.

      http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=87718&package_id=104183

      OpenOffice does have VBA support, but it doesn't work for everything. Most sane scripts should run... anything an Excel "Wizzard" did probably is going to have a problem, though. There's a bunch of info on the OO site about what parts of the language they do support, and what's planned. Info on that at: http://vba.openoffice.org/

  5. Hey Rocky... by netglen · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years ago by iguana · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. They can win! by Bullfish · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  8. Deployment is the secret by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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