Online collaborative apps market gets more crowded

THE MARKETPLACE for online collaborative software applications just got more crowded, as Adobe announced its acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, the maker of the Buzzword online word processor.

Adobe joins an already crowded market for online collaboration productivity toolsets that includes entries from IBM, Google, Microsoft and others.

Buzzword runs on something called AIR, which is said to be an Adobe runtime environment that extends online applications to the desktop and runs across different operating systems. Buzzword allows users to work with documents both locally on their desktops and shared online with master document owner permission setting and version control features.

Adobe's file sharing will be enabled by a service it calls, uh... Share, now in beta testing. It says Share is built with something else it calls Flex, which provides APIs that let developers combine mash-ups of data from different applications or create Flash based previews.

Still with the market-speak so far? Take a deep breath because there's more to come here.

Adobe said it plans to add dynamically updating data to business documents and will work jointly with Business Objects on new technologies to accomplish that. Its vision extends to integrating Business Objects' Xcelsius Connector with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, for example, so users will be able to stream real-time data into animated presentations.

David Mendels, an Adobe senior vice president, said Adobe's work with Business Objects could result in an environment with real-time data as "part of every document" using AIR, Flex and Flash. Also Buzzword, Share, Xcelsius and LiveCycle, we can only imagine.

It's sometimes easy to wonder if marketingfolk do self-parody on purpose or these blizzards of vaporous marketspeak just happen. µ

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