Adobe May Launch Office Rival 311
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.
Interesting stuff... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not there. Yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, they will never do this. But I bet it would work.
Re:If they are really smart. (Score:2, Interesting)
The real questions are 1) Will it support OpenDocument Format, and if so, how good will its support be? and 2) Will it support OOXML, and if so, how good will its support be?
If these two questions are answered in the affirmative, then Adobe's office suite may be at least an OpenOffice.org or StarOffice killer, and possibly a Microsoft Office killer.
Document format (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:If they are really smart. (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck! (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
Re:Adobe says they'll support Linux ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Adobe's always limped along when it came to linux development. From what I've seen of their flash support, I'm not expecting anything much when it comes to air compatibility. Flash 9 for linux has been in beta how long now, and this is after a huge wait with no flash 8 and a buggy flash 7. Given that air's already available for windows and osx, but not linux, I don't see much reason to believe anything's changed.
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not there. Yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html [openoffice.org]
Re:If they are really smart. (Score:3, Interesting)
Right. People have a tendency to think that Microsoft and Apple are the big competitors because Apple is producing an OS, but I think Adobe is in many ways a potential competitor to both Apple and Microsoft. If I were running Adobe, one of my big fears would be Apple and Microsoft developing their own in-house competitors to my software. It's already happened in some cases, with Apple producing Final Cut, and Microsoft trying to produce competitors to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the PDF file format.
Of course, it can be hard to compete with an application that is somehow tied to the OS. I also have seen many situations where people would be willing to switch to Linux except for the fact that they needed a particular Adobe application. Therefore, if I were running Adobe, I would probably have a top-secret project for making my own OS and DE, perhaps based on Linux/Gnome. If Adobe could produce their own platform that offered Adobe apps, an office suite, e-mail, and other generic stuff that people need, it would provide them with an independence from Apple/Microsoft that they don't currently have.
Re:MS Office Rival Welcomed (Score:2, Interesting)
If 2007 has raised the bar then the bar is set so low I'd have to limbo dance to get under it.
The new UI is the least intuitive I've seen in a long time, 97-2003 might not have been brilliant but at least people know where everything is after 6 and more years of training on it and using it.
Re:Adobe track record (Score:2, Interesting)
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!