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.

Market isn't closed...

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.

Re:Market isn't closed...

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.

Re:Market isn't closed...

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

Re:Market isn't closed...

Is this move anything more than an empty threat in response to Microsoft's very recent nasty surprise? [slashdot.org] Seriously.

Re:Market isn't closed...

ok then: Sega had the best selling console and dominated the market, but then they brought out the Saturn whilst upstart newcomer Sony the audacity to build and market something called the "playstation".

Remember the Saturn... no? Exactly.

Re:Market isn't closed...

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.

Re:Market isn't closed...

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.

Re:Market isn't closed...

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.

Deployment is the secret

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.

Not there. Yet?

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.

Re:Not there. Yet?

Out of curiosity, will the upcoming Chart module for 2.3 fix that for you? They completely redesigned the charting UI. I didn't see anything that specifically mentioned variable use, though.

http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html [openoffice.org]

Re:Not there. Yet?

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 [sourceforge.net]

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.

They will have a version for Window, Mac OS-X, and Linux.

Re:If they are really smart.

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.

Adobe says they'll support Linux ...

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.

Then again ...

"According to Wired, Adobe may launch its own office-application suite,

they may not.

Press Release from the DoRD

Adobe's Office Product Suite will include the following applications: -Buzzword Word Processor -Internet Net Browser -SlideShow Slide Maker

Good luck to them

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.

It would be nice...

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.

Makes sense

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.

Interesting stuff...

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?

Reader sucks, can you imagine Adobe Office?

It will take 25 minutes to start and will ask if you wanna update evry time you uses it.

Best Damn thing...

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.

Not a Quick Little Task

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.

Hey Rocky...

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.

Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years ago

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.

Re:Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years a

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).

Clippy v 2.0?

Buzzword can import and export Microsoft Word documents, it boasts built-in sharing and collaboration features, and it has a rich, animated user interface

Great, an animated user interface. As if work doesn't suck enough.

They can win!

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!

No no no

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

File Format?

The most important question for any word processor is "what file formats can it read/write?"

Word processors all have to read/write at least MS Word .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.

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 .doc and XML (with a public DTD and descriptive specs). Postscript/PDF would be nice, especially if Adobe lets people import PDF for editing.

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!

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.

Adobe, shmadobey

How about Adobe just tries to get Adobe Reader to work halfway decently?

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

Looks like they used the Buzzword word processor to make the press release:

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.'"

After running it through my "buzzword" processor, it comes out to:

We might make a word processing program.

Most annoying buzzword of the year:
    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...

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.

Simple deal coming soon

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.

Wired = Wrong. Adobe = Crashes.

According to Wired...

In other words, it's dead wrong then?

Adobe may launch its own office-application suite...

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

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.

How about including a competitor to MS Project

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 [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...

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

Google is trying to get into the office suite application space. Apple is moving there as well. The just released IWork 08 now includes a very nice spreadsheet program for example. Now Adobe declares that they are wanting to create an office suite program. All these companies would not be doing this at basically the same time if they didn't think that the time to tackle Microsoft in this area isn't coming soon.

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

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

Bloat?

Adobe reader is the slowest, most bloated thing ive ever seen. Never.

MS Office Rival Welcomed

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!

Now every time I open a document I will get 15 second pause then a screen asking me to upgrade to the latest version!

Linux angle

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

Too much attention paid to a non-announcement.

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.

Of all companies

Yay an even slower loading version of office!

Fuck Adobe

So Adobe, a company known for bloatware, is going to enter a field dominated by bloatware?? Why?

There's only one way to beat MS Office

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?

also

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?

all i can say is....

....i hope it uses a proprietrary, closed standard for the default file type, incompatible with oasis odf and all ms formats

Nah

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.

office suite os limitations

would this be only limited to microsloth OS or would it also include unix based OS as well?

Does this make Adobe the next Novell or Corel?

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.

Steve Carell can't be beat

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 [amctv.com]." 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

More Adobe CRAP

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.

I think everyone should keep in mind

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.

Win-win outcome

With any luck Adobe and Microsoft will put each other out of business.

Yay!

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.

ohgodno says it best

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!

Re:Rich Platform? Then port Photoshop

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.

Re:Rich Platform? Then port Photoshop

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. :-(

Re:Adobe track record

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!