Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 16th Aug 2007 16:53 UTC, submitted by Franz Netell
Adobe may launch its own office-application suite, taking it into direct competition with Microsoft. In an interview, Mike Downey, group manager for platform evangelism at Adobe, said that, although he could not reveal any plans at the moment, the possibility should not be dismissed.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
As I've noted before, there is a massive design synergy between the WYSIWYG office suite and the WYSIWYG Web-2.0 development suite.
The only way it makes sense for Adobe to enter the office space is as a part of a universal content creation suite for AIR. Adobe is arguably the industry leader in most aspects of multimedia content creation. The next step is to map this expertise onto the Web-2.0 notion of unified rich content.
An Adobe "office suite" will most likely treat ODF and OpenXML as limited import/export targets. The key for Adobe is making AIR the most compelling Web-2.0 framework. While multimedia and applications are the big-ticket items, the pathway to content framework dominance goes through the basic document.
The document is the volume market. Then Adobe can leverage this installed base to deliver premium creation modules such as animation and application development. All based on AIR, of course, and ready for consumption both online and offline. Decent strategy, huh?
Now you see how important it is for the free software community to get behind the lesser of the Web-2.0 evils. At least with Silverlight we can follow open specifications to create free software runtimes and tools. Adobe AIR is the proprietary Web, our worst nightmare.