Why Adobe's Purchase of Buzzword May Mark a Change in Adobe's Philosophy

As I said in my previous post, I haven't been on my site in a while, so even though I have been following my feeds (you can check out my link blog which is on my sidebar), I haven't "broken" any news.

So, despite the fact that the Adobe acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity is OLD NEWS, I feel the need to write about it, because I am very enthusiastic about the possibilities that could stem therefrom.

Adobe is one of the coolest companies around, I think, for one. The only thing I don't like about them is how insanely expensive their software is. Insanely expensive. Even so, each of their software products is the best in its market. That is why they can charge so much.

Buzzword, from Virtual Ubiquity, is also the best in its market (online word processing)*, but it sports one major departure from the Adobe product-line: it is super cheap. In fact, it's free. Now, don't get me wrong; Buzzword has a limited feature-set, and does not compare in professional-ness to other Adobe Products, like InDesign CS3.

But this is where it gets interesting. It looks to me like Adobe is endeavouring to open their products up to a new audience: people like me who have no money wherewith to purchase awesome, but insanely expensive products.

They have now purchased a simple but awesome word processor that will work on the Web from any computer with Flash 9, and will in the future work on the desktop. Not only are they making a neat word-processing tool accessible to everyone, they are making several extremely high-quality Adobe fonts accessible to people. With the addition of some more features, this could be a viable competitor to other companies in the same space. I think that the one major thing that will allow it to rise above Zoho Writer and Google Documents is simultaneous editing. I must admit, I have given up the usage of all other online and not-online word processors in favour of Buzzword, but one thing that I really miss about Google Docs and friends is the aforementioned feature, to be able to edit with a friend and not have the document lock out every time someone starts typing.

Adobe is also working on a consumer-level, free, online version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Express, which creates an easy way to edit photographs and make them look good, as opposed to really bad.

This program, like Buzzword, is built in Flash/Flex.

While this program does not provide the feature-set of full Adobe applications, it will effectively bring Adobe-style functionality to the masses.

I think that the acquisition of Buzzword and the creation of Photoshop Express mark this move that will ultimately lead inexpensive, yet high quality photo-editing, word-processing, and desktop publishing software for everyone (yeah, who wants to build InDesign in flex?????).

* I do not want to be misunderstood when I say this. It is difficult to pit Flash-based software against Ajax-based software, because they are so very different. An accomplishment in Ajax may be something that has been around forever in something like Flash, but the reason Ajax is significant is that it is (hopefully) fast, and more accessible to people on all sorts of computers.