Adobe Buzzword Buzz Kill: NO Virtual Ubiquity
Adobe raises stakes for Web documents, Adobe’s new word processor gorgeous…Adobe joins rest of industry in going for Microsoft’s throat!!!!
The buzz is deafening hailing Adobe’s acquisiition of Buzzword.
For ex Microsoftie Robert Scoble, the “very cool” collaborative online word processor acquired by Adobe piles on the “blood in the water,” even though he acknowledges ”insiders/early adopters” are the “sharks” sniffing around for Microsoft blood.
Perhaps it is by Adobe design! After all, Buzzword may be the creation of “Virtual Ubiquity,” but the “open for public trials” is NOT virually ubiquitous, as its unfriendly, “unsupported browser,” (not so) welcome illustrates.
(Tested on several computers, Buzzword does NOT present a user-friendly welcome to “the public” with open “ground-breaking” arms)
Buzzword is also NOT corporate friendly, as Scobleizer commentor Bob says “LOL” to ‘blood in the water’ threats:
Sorry, but no serious business is going to use ANY of these apps for “collaboration”. First, the web-apps themselves suck. Second, Microsoft has robust collaboration solutions for business use.
Now, if you’re just some geek wanting to collaborate on unimportant things like fantasy football or chocolate-chip cookie recepies, then fine, use this web-app crap to do the necessary collaboration. Serious minded folk won’t use this stuff for anything serious.
You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of when AOL bought Time-Warner (and yes, at the time the “merger” occurred it was AOL buying TW). AOL changed Time Warner’s internal email system from Exchange to AOL Mail. After all, web-mail was the incoming thing; there was no need for internal email systems anymore, right? As you may guess, the experiment led to a wide-scale revolt, Exchange was brought back fairly quickly, and those that tried to force web-solution where it didn’t belong were reprimanded and/or dismissed.
Same thing here. Business are not going to sacrifice 95% of MS Office’s functionality just for the opportunity to use web-apps for collaboration.
Another thing this reminds me of is all of the web-appliances that were announced in the late 90’s. None of them used MS software, and I remember an article trashing Microsoft saying, “Web-appliance is code for ‘No Window’ and there’s nothing Microsoft can do about it!”, or words to that effect. Today, there is only one of those web-appliances left. And it’s Microsoft’s!
This also reminds me of Novell going on a buying spree to create an Office suite to take down Microsoft. In the late 90’s, Novell bought fellow Utah tech company Word Perfect, Borland’s Quatro Pro, and some Presentation app. Two years later, they had run Word Perfect into the ground, the Word Perfect employees had left so nobody was left that even knew the details of the source code, and finally Novell sold the whole thing to Corel.
Scoble, these companies you listed only *think* they smell “blood in the water”. Companies have thought that in the past too.
Bob’s “serious minded folk won’t use this stuff for anything serious” Scobleizer rebuttal can also be applied to Scoble’s 5000 Facebook “friends, fans and enemies” mission accomplished.
PLUS: Schmidt to Ballmer: Stop Stealing MY Office Collaboration Lines!
ALSO: With Facebook Platform as a Developer Friend, Who Needs Enemies? and Twitter + Facebook = Scoble 10,900 (4 seconds per friend)