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.
Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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Microsoft isn't about to make the same mistake WP/Novell/Corel made. I was a WP user. But, the boys in Orem let the product lanquish and the Corel ignored it for too many years. They stayed in the pit stop while MS lapped them 50 times over.
Now, if MS seriously falls down and ignores thier product, yes, a competitor will take over.
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Even so that is not what killed WP. It was killed because of price. People want cheep/free (see previous
T
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Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the Saturn... no? Exactly.
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And I remember the Oric 1 [freeuk.com], what's your point? :-)
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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
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Since I switched to OS X about two years ago, I made the decision not to be locked into MS-only products, so I'm using iWork. If you think I just replaced a monopoly and closed format with another, you're right. But I can also export my files into quite a number of formats from each iWork application, so switching again (to, say, Linux) shouldn't be a problem.
As for Adobe being recognized as a brand to help push
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Right...but the Xbox and Xbox 360 have cost Microsoft billions of dollars, not to mention the fact that neither console have ever been the market leader.
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And that audacity has cost them 2 Billions of dollars per iterations ($4B so far...).
The fact that you can buy market share in an established procedure, the problem is to actually create a product that is competitive enough and cheaper enough to displace the entrenched competition. I would not use
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Star Division thrived long enough to get bought by Sun. There are other regional players. It's also possible to be in the field if you are not depending on this for your bread and butter. Sun is a great example of this.
Microsoft killed off the specialty vendors. That doesn't mean that someone else can't come along and buy their way into the market based on being dominant in something else.
It worked well enough for MS.
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Lets swap one monopoly for another
Re:Market isn't closed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, they will never do this. But I bet it would work.
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Only if they reduce their prices.
If they come out with an office suite that uses a pricing model similar to what they're using for the CS3 suites, nobody will be able to afford it.
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I'm not sure what you mean by that. OpenOffice, WordPerfect, Everything on OS X, KWord, Google Docs, and AbiWord all support PDF export and more than half of them support PDF import. MS Word is the only one that does not support PDF export natively (because of antitrust issues).
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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.
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1. Your scenario assumes Adobe would gives its stuff away for free. They won't.
2. OSes already come with basic word processors (e.g. Windows has WordPad, Mac has TextEdit) which are already powerful enough for most users anyway. So Adobe bundling something into Flash/Acrobat wouldn't achieive higher penetration than what OSes already provide. Why use some Flash-W
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considering that we have built this platform that makes it easy to build rich applications
I don't know about anyone else, but my experience with Adobe Acrobat (now Adobe Reader) is that while it certainly looks pretty it's slow and stuttery, tends to cause Firefox to hang, has a poor interface, and doesn't "play nice" with other company's software any more than M$ Office - and maybe even less. Just my 2 cents.
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.
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I consider myself a speadsheet power user, using both OO.org and Excel when each is better.
I have only found 2 things I use that can't be done in
OO.org Text To Columns
and VB.
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At least as of 4 months ago, last I used it, could not be done.
The charting UI system and click context interface is pretty gay too, if I can say so.
Re:Not there. Yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html [openoffice.org]
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And that's a feature, not a bug, of OO. If you've actually tried to do this, you need to surf over to http://www.edwardtufte.com/ [edwardtufte.com], buy all the man's books, and read them. Then you'll have some better ideas about how to use charts to communicate information rather than muddle. My brain hurts just thinking about what that chart must look like...
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We have an internal tool we use for presentation quality plots.
Re:Not there. Yet? (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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OIC, so you're saying that Microsoft has locked up the business/enterprise office software market because they never ignore / gloss over / minimize the flaws of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or ... Access?
I'll agree with you that Excel is the best app to take a stand on for MS, but what percentage of Excel users make use of fe
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If they are really smart. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 Microso
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Re:If they are really smart. (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's written in Flash
*cough*?!
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f they are really smart... They will have a version for Window, Mac OS-X, and Linux.
If they are really smart they'll focus on Windows and OS X with support for MSOffice formats, but with the default format being ODF. Linux support would be a plus, but it will not make or break them and companies looking at the benefits of Linux are probably also looking at the cost benefits of Open Office. Any company looking at the office suite market has to decide how big of gamble to take. They can try to go for a proprietary lock-in and become the new MS of the market, or they can try to kill MS's st
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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 c
Adobe says they'll support Linux ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Document format (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why is "human readable" an important aspect of document formats? Are MP3s human readable? What about video?
I think if you get rid of that single caveat, I'd be all over an "open" format.
I don't know why it bothers me so much that people think that formats have to be human readable - I think that's an unnecessary restriction.
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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.
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Then again ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Press Release from the DoRD (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting stuff... (Score:2, Interesting)
Reader sucks, can you imagine Adobe Office? (Score:2, Funny)
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Bloated, buggy, and overpriced. (Score:2)
<rant>
And each suite license will cost $3,000
Mod me troll if you like, but if Adobe's latest releases of Acrobat reader are any indication of how this conceptual suite will be released, I'd rather take my chances with MS, or even better, open office.
Using Acrobat Reader 8 as a benchmark: Acrobat Reader 8 takes too long to launch, pesters you with some update that usually just adds to the program's bloat of unnecessary features, and to top it off, 8 sometimes "page tears" when you scroll -- a bug
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)
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.
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Re:Because it worked SO well for Novell 10 years a (Score:4, Informative)
Clippy v 2.0? (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
File Format? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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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.
A lot of companies do this and Adobe may do it too. Or they could go with the ODF standard and capitalize upon all the other software that is already compatible with ODF.
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.
I've never seen anything that forbids you writing a program that edits PDF files. The problem is, PDF is a format designed for print and portability, so it does not contain a lot of the information that is really, really useful for editing. PDF is a lot closer to a vector image than a word processing file and was not designed to be edi
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There can be as many Office competitors as there are software vendors and MS Office will always win as long as the standard document format is *.doc (or the new equivalent).
If the document standard can be changed to an open one, then whether it's the next day or the next year, MS Office is history because the product itself is just not that good technically.
PS - IMO Adobe makes horrible crap, the only thing that's even half g
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Not at all far fetched. But not nearly a done deal, either.
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)
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
That's not a product name, it's a warning label (Score:2)
Simple deal coming soon (Score:2)
Ugh...please not another Adobe monster (Score:2)
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
How about including a competitor to MS Project (Score:2)
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 of
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http://www.agileagenda.com/ [agileagenda.com]
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Actually, I lied... it won't be a competitor. I want to do something different than what project wants you to do. I don't believe in ever setting the start or end date of tasks. You should be able to enter them all in, set up rules for how they behave, and the software should do it all for you. It's similar to the MS Project concept of leveling resources, but it actually understands what "today" is, and knows when things are late or ahead of schedule and adj
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.
Motivations (Score:2)
Linux angle (Score:2)
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 quirk
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They can bundle it with flash... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm usually not a fan of bundling, but I'd forgive them for this since it's about time someone hits microsoft with their own tricks.
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WHY???? (Score:2)
Why create any application that has any level of market penetration, on a platform created by a company that is in direct competition with your product, or at least can enter into competition at any time.
Seriously! We've seen how it works. Mozilla - IE, Word Perfect - Word, 123 - Excel, Quicken - Money, Notes - Exchange, NDS - ADS.
While the lure of 95% market share OS is strong, I would think that in the long run, it is futile; The Borg will assimilate your custome
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Or Google Apps?
And I don't use Flash.
My point wasn't about OFFICE applications, but application development in general.
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The unwashed masses tend to confuse beautiful with lots of clipart, font styles and colors, bolding and italicizing rather than functional and effective though.
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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 obv
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That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your individual requirements.
Yes Virginia, individual users have their own requirements.
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Back in '97 I used Photoshop AND Illustrator on an SGI running IRIX.
Its portable. They've done it. Just not for Linux.
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So yeah, it appears to be possible to get it to work on OSs other than Windows.
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I'll bet all the people who gripe about this are running MS Windows versions. I never have such problems but then, I'm using Safari on Mac OS X and Firefox on Linux.
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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.
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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...
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