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Adobe May Launch Office Rival
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:51 PM
from the now-it-gets-interesting dept.
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.
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Firehose:Adobe may launch Office rival by Anonymous Coward
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Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=911325 | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @02:52PM)
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=911325 | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @02:52PM)
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.
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday March 26 2004, @02:46PM)
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.
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.sanityonline.com/)
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the Saturn... no? Exactly.
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://tsfraser.googlepages.com/index.html)
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.
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 19 2004, @06:57AM)
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.
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, they will never do this. But I bet it would work.
Deployment is the secret (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not there. Yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.nojailforpot.com/)
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.
Re:Not there. Yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://wire-head.org/)
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html [openoffice.org]
Re:Not there. Yet? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://wire-head.org/)
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou
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/ [openoffice.org]
If they are really smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://altgrendel.exit0.us/)
Re:If they are really smart. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday March 13 2007, @02:39PM)
Adobe says they'll support Linux ... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.komar.org/christmas/)
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.
Then again ... (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.globaltics.net/)
Press Release from the DoRD (Score:3, Funny)
Good luck to them (Score:1)
(http://www.softreset.net/)
It would be nice... (Score:1)
Makes sense (Score:1)
Interesting stuff... (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.egyptiankarim.com/)
Reader sucks, can you imagine Adobe Office? (Score:2, Funny)
Best Damn thing... (Score:1)
(http://webpages.charter.net/gmac63/)
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.
Not a Quick Little Task (Score:2)
Hey Rocky... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years ago (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.mbuf.com | Last Journal: Wednesday June 29 2005, @09:10AM)
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.
Re:Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years a (Score:4, Informative)
Clippy v 2.0? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.mikeiscool.net/)
Great, an animated user interface. As if work doesn't suck enough.
They can win! (Score:5, Funny)
Could be the best thing to ever happen to open office!
No no no (Score:1, Interesting)
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
File Format? (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
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.
Good luck! (Score:1, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Saturday May 31 2003, @06:23AM)
Adobe, shmadobey (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Buzzword word processor (Score:2)
(http://www.mobydisk.com/)
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
Not sure I care... (Score:1)
Simple deal coming soon (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 31, @08:33AM)
Wired = Wrong. Adobe = Crashes. (Score:1)
In other words, it's dead wrong then?
Yeah, that would be fun.
"Loading document...(screen goes white)...CRASH"
How about working on making the free PDF writer stable enough for daily browser use first? (I've given up trying to launch PDFs on most browsers; I always download them to disk and then use a local reader that I can kill when it freezes rather than have to nuke my browser.)
Ugh...please not another Adobe monster (Score:2)
(http://youtube.com/thedarkener)
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.
How about including a competitor to MS Project (Score:2)
(http://nzruss.blogspot.com/)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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....
Just what I always wanted... (Score:2)
A way to have the intuitive easy to use GUI of Photoshop spread to applications I use more often.
Companies smell blood in the water (Score:1)
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.
Motivations (Score:2)
Bloat? (Score:1)
MS Office Rival Welcomed (Score:1)
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.Hooray! (Score:1)
Linux angle (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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
Too much attention paid to a non-announcement. (Score:1)