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.

Adobe says they'll support Linux ...

[xmas2003]

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.

Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years ago

[iguana]

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

[Attila Dimedici]

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).

Re:Market isn't closed...

[Anonymous Coward]

there was Microsoft with the audacity to build and market something called the "X Box".

And the Xbox bleeds money year after year. And the next-gen console sales are currently dominated by former market leader Nintendo. Were you trying to refute OP's point or support it?

Re:Not there. Yet?

[aaronl]

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]

Re:Adobe says they'll support Linux ...

[Constantine XVI]

Flash 9 Linux is NOT beta.

Re:Market isn't closed...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"correction: playstation was NINTENDO's folly, Sony built up samples that became PS to be the manufacture at N64 time and nintendo backed out"

Correction: It would have been Nintendo's folly to have continued with the Playstation. They backed out because Sony got greedy over licesning and branding. The CD-ROM deal with Sony would have been very destructive to Nintendo. They backed out and lost market-share, but they remained very profitable. The PS would have come out either way, at least in this case they didn't lose their brand over it.

Nah

[ACMENEWSLLC]

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.

Re:MS Office Rival Welcomed

[SEMW]

If I want to do something out of the ordinary (say, mail merge) the only quick way is to try and remember the Office 2003 keystrokes because it's impossible to quickly find anything on those stupid toolbars.

Ummm... Seriously? Of the seven toolbars in Word 2007, one is labelled "Mailings". Sure enough, mail merge is the third icon on that toolbar. If you seriously think that having mail merge under "Mailings" is more intuitive than having under "Tools" (aka "miscellaneous"), then, well... You're entitled to your opinion...