Adobe has acquired Waltham, Mass.-based Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum, and in doing so has officially entered the web office fray. Virtual Ubiquity are the creators of Buzzword, an online, collaborative word processing application powered by Adobe's Flex framework. It runs cross-browser in the Flash player and just might be the best word processor on the web.
That sounds like hyperbole, but after playing around with Buzzword for the past couple of days, I'm nearly ready to trade in Microsoft Word -- nearly. I've been long hesitant to trade in my faithful Microsoft Office suite for Zoho, ThinkFree, or Google offerings, but Buzzword addresses a number of my niggling concerns and even manages to do some things far better than Microsoft does.
With this acquisition, Adobe appears to be announcing their intentions to go head-to-head with Google and Microsoft in the coming office wars. Microsoft has long held the dominant position when it comes to office software, but that may be about to change due to the increasingly more usable nature of the growing field of web office applications. And because of a planned Adobe Integrated Runtime version of Buzzword, Adobe has designs on the desktop, too.
I admittedly had not used Buzzword until this past week, though some commenters called me to task for not including it in the 10 Must Have Online Office Apps post -- and they were right. In terms of user experience, Buzzword trumps Google Docs easily.
As I said, Buzzword is built on Adobe's Flex framework and runs in the browser using the Flash player (it requires version 9, which as Emily Chang pointed out in August may limit corporate adoption). The interface is slick and seems reminiscent of recent Adobe imaging applications, such as Lightroom (at least to my untrained eye).
The first screen that greets users upon logging in is a file browser. Files can be sorted alphabetically, by author, by last viewed or changed, by your permissions (more on that later), or by size. Sort by size is an interesting feature because Buzzword sorts by number of pages rather than file size, which is a much more helpful visual tool.
Buzzword uses a system of slidable "pleats" for menu navigation, which means no digging through loads of nested menus to find a feature. Everything is presented visually on screen in each pleat. The system is reminiscent of the ribbon menus in Microsoft Word 2007. Stylistically, they are a bit different (the ribbons are better suited to the larger number of features that Word has), but functionally they accomplish the same goal.
I can honestly say that Buzzword is the first online word processor that I have used that made me forget I was using an online word processor. Much of the reason that I have not yet made the jump to Zoho or Google Docs is that I just think Word does things better, but Buzzword feels very comfortable to me, coming from Word. Buzzword actually beats Word in some areas. One feature that I used very often as a freelance editor was track changes. While Buzzword doesn't have a track changes feature, it does have comments, and anyone who has left comments on a Word document knows that it can quickly become a confusing spiderweb of lines and margin bubbles. Buzzword cleverly avoids all that confusion by ditching the connecting lines, instead dimming the background and highlighting the related text when viewing a comment. It is these little touches that I think makes Buzzword so special.
Buzzword certainly isn't as full featured as desktop competitors, but it nails the basics with a certain panache. It also adds some features that its desktop brethren can't, such as document sharing. Every document in Buzzword can be shared under any of three permissions levels: co-author (allowed to edit), reviewer (can read and comment), and reader (can read only). Buzzword keeps track of every version of the document and can roll back to previous version with a single click.
That Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity is a major development on the web office front. Until now Buzzword had mostly been flying under the radar, but with Adobe's backing it should be pushed into the mainstream a lot faster. Of all the online word processors I have tried, it is easily the most enjoyable to use and the first that I think could seriously give Microsoft a run for its money, especially given that Adobe and Virtual Ubiquity plan an offline AIR-based version of the app that would automatically sync up changes you make to any documents with your online storage space.
The question now becomes: is Adobe planning a larger push into the web office space?
Note: Josh Catone is at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, September 30 - October 3, courtesy of Adobe.
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The online word processing market got more interesting today when Adobe announced their intention of purchasing Virtual Ubiquity, the company that created Buzzword, an online Flex based word processor. Buzzword is currently available in a public beta: yo Read More
Coincident with Microsoft’s announcement today responding to all the online Web office application bustle, Adobe jumped into the game by announcing the acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, a vendor with an online word processing application convenie... Read More
TITLE: Adobe Aquires Virtual Ubiquity; Enters Web-Office Arena URL: http://www.derrickshields.com/blog/adobe-aquires-virtual-ubiquity-enters-web-office-arena IP: 72.249.20.209 BLOG NAME: Derrick Shields DATE: 10/01/2007 01:24:13 PM Read More
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Sigh! Of course they will not let ordinary mortals in to follow up on your enthusiastic review.
Posted by: Bob Boynton | September 30, 2007 11:00 PMbuzzword is great, but I'm sure that a lot of people will not accept flash context menu on word processor of their choise...
Posted by: milan | September 30, 2007 11:59 PMGreat post. It makes absolute sense that if Adobe wants to enter the office wars, it will do it with th best product built on its own platform. This gives the company the freedom to rapidly incorporate new advances in the way its platform can be used into the product.
This is also effectively an example of how the large software companies can "outsource" R&D fr commercialization: Let other smaller entities take the risk of creating new uses, and when one works it's worth paying to bring it in-house.
The real question for me is the future value in control of office products. With the many options listed in your last post, do we think that these integrated suites will have the same value and importance in three years that they had three years ago? If not, why enter the fray?
Bruce Judson
Posted by: Bruce Judson | October 1, 2007 3:33 AMFounder, Search Free Apps
http://www.SearchFreeApps.com
A Modest (billion-dollar) proposal
Imagine the following scenario. A secretive meeting, years ago, when Apple´s Steve Jobs, the benevolent dictator, put in place a strategy to get into the music business. It included not only a gadget, but also an online store, iTunes. I have no idea how that meeting went, but one thing is for sure: many people afterwards must have been back-stabbing Jobs, and mentioning "the music business? We´re going to sell music? This guy has totally lost it."
Fact of the matter was, technology had forever changed the economics of the music business, and Jobs could see it.
Having said that, I´d like to make a modest, billion-dollar, proposal, to the likes of Adobe, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and whomever else might be up to the task.
Cui Bono?
Think about science publishing. I publish papers for a living. My first paper came out in Biological Cybernetics, a journal which cost, in 1998, over US$2000 for a one year subscription. I live scared to death of Profa. Deborah, who reviews my scientific output. And there are others like me in this world. Oh yes, many others.
The economics of science publishing is completely crazy for this day and age. Authors give enormous effort to bring their work to light, editors and journal and conference referees also put in enormous effort. All of that is unpaid, of course (or at least indirectly paid, in the hopes of tenure and/or prestige). But then, our masterpieces go to a journal, which obliges me to transfer copyright to the likes of Elsevier, or Springer, or someone else. Then some money starts to show up! According to wikipedia, Springer had sales exceeding €900 million in 2006, while Elsevier upped the ante to a pre-tax profit (in the REED annual report) to a staggering €1 billion (on €7.9 Billion turnover). But for those who brought out the scientific results, for those that bring the content, and the fact checking by referees and editors, all that work goes unpaid. The money goes to those who typeset it, then store it in a server, then print it out and mail it to libraries worldwide. And let´s not forget those which actually pay for the research, the public, as most research is government-financed. In the words of Michael Geist, a law professor:
Cancer patients seeking information on new treatments or parents searching for the latest on childhood development issues were often denied access to the research they indirectly fund through their taxes
How did we get here? A better question is how could it have been otherwise? In the last decades, how could a different industrial organization appear? Cui Bono?
Lowly (and busy) professors or universities were obviously not up to the risky and costly task of printing and mailing thousands of journals worldwide, every month. A few societies emerged, and, mostly funded by their membership, they were up to the task. So, in time, the business of science publishing emerged and eventually consolidated in the hands of a few players. And these few players could focus on typesetting, printing, mailing much better than the equation-loving professors or the prestige & money-seeking universities.
The other day I tried to download my own paper published in the journal " Artificial Intelligence", and I was asked to pay USD30.00 for it. That´s the price of a book, and I was the author of the thing in the first place!
Now, if you ask me, technology has forever changed the economics of the scientific publishing business, and it´s high time for someone like Jobs to step forward.
Adobe Buzzword is specially suited to do this. Most scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer) and societies (IEEE, ACM, APA, APS, INFORMS) have just one or two typesetting styles for papers. I imagine a version of Buzzword which carries only the particular typesetting style(s) of the final published document, and researchers would already prepare those manuscripts ready for publication (there are glitches today, of course, like high-quality images and tables and equations--but hey, we´re talking about Adobe here!). A submit button would submit the papers for evaluation, either to a journal or a conference. Referees could make comments and annotation on the electronic manuscript itself, or even suggest minor rewritings of a part here and there. The process would be much smoother than even the most modern of online submission processes. And, since Adobe has flash, this means that they´re especially positioned to bring up future papers with movies, sounds, screencasts and whole simulations embedded. Wouldn´t that be rich? Doesn´t that beautifully fit with what´s stated in their page?
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information .
But Buzzword is just my favorite option (because it enables beautiful typesetting, is backed by a large, credible, player, works on any platform, and enables worldwide collaboration between authors, editors, referees). Other options could be desktop processors (MsWord, Pages, OpenOffice, etc). There would be a productivity gain by using something the likes of Buzzword, but using desktop processors wouldn´t affect the overall idea.
Now, why would the people in Adobe, Yahoo, SUN, IBM, Microsoft, Google, or others actually want to do a thing like that?
There are two reasons. The first one is goodwill, the second one is money.
Goodwill
I recently had a paper outright rejected in the IBM Systems Journal. In retrospect, I now see that it was a very bad call to submit there. I had mentioned that choice to the editor of a very prestigious scientific journal, and he responded by saying: "They´re going to hate it. They´re not in the business of publishing great original science for a long time now. That´s just a marketing thing; they´re in the business of trying to impress customers." I responded that I thought that they´d be open-minded; that the journal had had some great contributions in the past and I thought it was just great. I was, of course, wrong. They didn´t even look at the thing; they didn´t even bother to send back a message. After a quick check, I felt enormously stupid: all papers, or maybe not all but something way above 90%, come from IBM authors. The IBM Systems Journal, it seems to me, is now a branch of IBM´s marketing department. And while it may impress less sophisticated customers, it´s definitely a huge loss for IBM.
The Systems Journal (and their R&D journal) used to be a fountain of goodwill for IBM. Scientists took pride in publishing there, and hordes of researchers (not customers) browsed it and studied it carefully. It was a fountain of goodwill--with a direct route to IBM´s bottom line: it attracted the best scientists to IBM. Now that it´s in the hands of marketing, you can hardly find any serious scientist considering it as a potential outlet. If I were in IBM, I´d be fighting to change things around. But I´m not there, I can speak the truth as I see it, and I can just submit somewhere else. The BELL LABS Technical Journal also seems to be meeting the same "marketing department" fate. Don´t expect to see nobel prizes coming from these journals any time soon.
When these journals didn´t belong to marketing, they brought, at least to this observer, a huge amount of goodwill and good publicity for their respective companies. The HR department must have loved choosing among the best PhDs dying to get into IBM. Sad to mention, I doubt that the best PhDs are now begging to work on these companies anymore.
Yet, IBM could change things around. As could Adobe, SUN, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and many others. What I feel they should do is establish a platform for online paper submission, review, and publication. This platform should be made openly available for all scientific societies, for free. From the prestigious journal "Cognitive Science" to the Asia-Pacific Medical Education Conference, this platform should be free (to societies, journals, and conferences) and the papers published online should be freely accessible to all, no login, no paywall, nothing in the way. Copyright should remain in the hands of authors. Gradually, one after another, journals and conferences would jump ship, as the platform gained credibility and respectability.
Now here´s the kicker. It´s not only about goodwill. There´s money to be made.
Money
One crucial point is for the platform to be freely accessible to all. But you can do that, and still block the googlebot, the yahoobot, and all others "bots", but your own. Let´s say, for instance, that Microsoft does something of the sort. In some years time, not only it gets the goodwill of graduate students who are studying papers published by science.microsoft.org (as opposed to hey-sucker-pay-thirty-bucks-for-your-own-paper-Elsevier), but also the way to search for such information would be only through that website. As we all know, advertising is moving online: according to a recent study, the last year saw "$24 billion spent on internet advertising and $450 billion spent on all advertising ". Soon we´ll reach US$100 Billion/year in advertising on the web. And imagine having a privileged position in the eyeballs of graduate-educated people, from medicine to science to economics to business to engineering to history.
I hope someone will pull something like this off. Maybe for the goodwill. Or maybe for the money.
Many companies could pull it off, but some seem specially suited to the task. My favorite would be Adobe--with buzzword and AIR and flash and pdfs, that´s definitely my choice. Google might want to do it just to preempt some other company from blocking the googlebot to get its hands on valuable scientific research. Microsoft, the Dracula of the day, certainly needs the goodwill, and it could help it to hang on to the MS-Word lock in. Maybe Amazon would find this interesting--fits nicely with their web storage and search dreams. Yahoo would have the same reason as Google.
I don´t see Apple doing it. I think it could actually hurt their market value, as investors might think that they would be over-stretching, ever expanding into new markets.
I don´t see IBM or SUN doing it either; in fact, if anyone in a board meeting ever proposed this, I can only see the exact same back-stabbing that must have gone through, years ago, in Apple: "Science-publishing? This guy has totally lost it. This is IBM, and that´s not the business we´re in." They´re to busy handling their own internal office politics, who´s getting promotion and pay packages. Innovation is hardly coming in from there (though both have been embracing open-source to a certain degree).
One thing is for sure. The open-access to research movement is getting momentum everyday. It´s time to sell that Elsevier stock.
Just a final note. If any player is willing to do this, use an org domain name. Don´t name it "Microsoft Science". That won´t work with intelligent, independent scientists. Use a domain name such as science.yahoo.org, science.adobe.org, and name it as "Open science", "World of Science", anything... but please don´t try to push your name too far. Let it grow slowly.
And just in case someone wants to pull this off, and is actually wondering... I´m right here.
Posted by: Alex Linhares | October 6, 2007 4:49 AM