On the heels of last week's release of the Technical Communication Suite comes an interesting announcement this morning as Adobe kicks off the week (and its Max developer conference) by announcing that it has purchased Virtual Ubiquity and its online word processor Buzzword for an undisclosed amount.
In addition, it also announced the availability of a new online document sharing service called Share (at least for now; they say it's a code name). This service, in the tradition of Google Labs, is in the Adobe Labs, but the press release indicated you can sign up now if you wish.
The match-up with Virtual Ubiquity makes sense since the word processor was developed using Adobe's rich internet application development environment, Flex, and works inside the Flash player.
I certainly like the idea of being able to share documents online, especially large documents, but what's more interesting is the fact that Adobe has itself a word processor, which along with its other tools makes it a complete content creation vendor from word processing to PDF to Dreamweaver (or whatever tool in the Adobe arsenal).
It remains to be seen whether this is a good word processing offering, one that will make customers move away from the familiar and ubiquitous Microsoft Word, but the fact that Adobe has decided to go off on its own is in itself significant and may even be a subtle shot at the bow of Microsoft that Adobe is not content to cede the word processing part of the content creation equation to Word.
What do you think? Is this a good move? Leave a comment and let me know.
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