Adobe Raises The Stakes For Web Documents With Buzzword and Share
The list of companies offering free, Web-based word processors just got longer. Today, Adobe is entering the Webtop game (watch out, Microsoft Office) with its announcement that it will purchase Boston-based startup Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind Buzzword.
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe is buying Boston startup Virtual Ubiquity, maker of the Flash-based Buzzword word processor, and offering it free on the Web — the same day Microsoft finally unveiled its answer to Google Docs. The two moves land together because the Web office market has reached the point where every major platform owner needs a browser-delivered document story.
The pickup was broad for a startup acquisition: Adobe's own release, Read/WriteWeb, Webware and Scobleizer all covered it within a day, with Webware judging Buzzword 'gorgeous but underpowered' and Scobleizer framing the deal as the industry going for Microsoft's throat. The strategic logic rests on assets named in the deal itself — Buzzword runs on Flash, which Adobe controls.
First-order effects
- Virtual Ubiquity's team and Buzzword move inside Adobe, giving Adobe an entry in free Web-based word processing that it did not have to build itself.
- Microsoft now faces one more zero-priced Web word processor on top of Google Docs, arriving the very week it rolled out its own online Office response.
Second-order effects
- Google and the other Web office players must compete on document fidelity and collaboration rather than price, since Adobe has set the floor at free.
- Adobe's control of Flash gives Buzzword a distribution and rendering advantage rivals cannot license, pushing competitors toward their own proprietary runtimes or plugins.
Third-order effects
- If incumbents keep entering Web office by acquiring startups rather than building in-house, expect more of the independent Web-top word processors to be absorbed by platform owners.
- The deal points toward document creation migrating off the desktop suite entirely, with the file format and runtime — not the application — becoming the contested layer.
The trend: Office productivity is unbundling from the desktop suite into browser-delivered applications, with platform owners like Adobe and Microsoft buying or building their way in during 2007.