Threats to Office's Dominance Multiply with New Offerings from Adobe, IBM -- Visual Studio Magazine

Threats to Office's Dominance Multiply with New Offerings from Adobe, IBM

Paying for word processing software may soon be a thing of past if Microsoft competitors Adobe, Google and IBM have any say.

By Becky Nagel
06/03/2008

Paying for word processing software may soon be a thing of past if Microsoft competitors Adobe, Google and IBM have any say.

Google already offers Google Docs, a free hosted suite of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools plus online storage. And, of course, there's OpenOffice, the no-cost, open source application suite currently working on its third version.

Now Adobe has jumped into the fray with Acrobat.com, a new beta site featuring free online hosting and collaboration tools. The suite offers a word processor, PDF converter and Web conferencing/desktop sharing tools.

Adobe will be integrating Acrobat.com into Acrobat 9, coming in July. Developer APIs are available for custom integration, the company said.

"Acrobat.com enables individuals to truly work collaboratively on electronic documents," the company said in its announcement of the suite. "Acrobat.com delivers a new way for people to work together online."

Registration for the site is currently open.

And that's not the only new threat: IBM today unveiled the 1.0 version of Lotus Symphony, its free application suite based on the Open Document Format (ODF).

Symphony, released in beta format last year, offers a word processing, spreadsheet and presentation program. It also offers open APIs for integration with Eclipse or other frameworks, the company said.

The free download of 1.0 is now available here, although IBM's Symphony blog notes that the site is experiencing "intermittent problems with the downloads due to heavy demand."

Along with the release of the suite today, IBM announced a new "elite" support package for large enterprises using Symphony. According to reports, the package costs a flat $25,000.

While Microsoft offers free online collaboration tools for Office users through its Office Live Workspace beta, users must have purchased versions of the related Office software to use the site. The Office Live Small Business version of the offering includes a Web site, e-mail and domain name free for one year.

About the Author

Becky Nagel serves as vice president of AI for 1105 Media specializing in developing media, events and training for companies around AI and generative AI technology. She also regularly writes and reports on AI news, and is the founding editor of PureAI.com. She's the author of "ChatGPT Prompt 101 Guide for Business Users" and other popular AI resources with a real-world business perspective. She regularly speaks, writes and develops content around AI, generative AI and other business tech. Find her on X/Twitter @beckynagel.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.