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Web 2.0 - Monday, October 1, 2007

Adobe Buys Web Word Processor Virtual Ubiquity

Adobe is turning some heads with its announcements today:
1) It is buying Web-based word processor Buzzword, which is made by Virtual Ubiquity.
2) Adobe added a new file sharing service to its current online document services, codenamed “Share.”
3) It expects to launch more Web-based applications so look for spreadsheets, and presentations to come.

Waltham, MA based Virtual Ubiquity had taken funding from Adobe's venture capital group. At this point there is no disclosure on the size of the buy-out. The company did take this as an opportunity to buy their domain Buzzword.com.

Buzzword uses Adobe Flex 2.0 as the development environment and Flash 9 as the runtime platform. The application is worthy of Adobe's high standards with beautiful typography, n-screen pagination, rich text, tables, and graphics. And friends, teachers, and colleagues can add comments right on the page.

It will be interesting to see who gets better distribution for their Web-based word processor: Google or Adobe? We tend to think that this is a very long term campaign against the dominance of MS Word but that residents of poorer countries will adopt first. Google has the fuller suite at this point and pushes their apps to all Gmail users - and it also has a big marketing efforts behind it - so we would put our money on Google at this point.

Read - Adobe announcement