Adobe is about to attempt to compete with Microsoft’s Word by investing in BuzzWord an online word processor made by Virtual Ubiquity.
If you’re from Ottawa you’ve probably heard of Corel, the makers of CorelDraw and the current home of WordPerfect. I have not been a fan of Corel since they took my beloved Fractal Design Painter and messed up version 9 so badly. The buggy software kept crashing and was ultimately useless on my mac. I really can’t see how anyone can deliver garbage software like that and get away with it (for long).
Corel is pretty insignificant when compared to Adobe in annual revenue figures. Corel ~$250 million vs Adobe’s $2.5 billion. Yet, Corel might have a few lessons it could teach Adobe about competing with Microsoft. It’s not pretty when you try to compete with entrenched software products like MS Word. The trick here is to convince people to switch from something that already works. It’s even more difficult to convince people to switch to ‘older’ software. Luckily for Adobe, Buzzword is new and exciting! However, the potential customer base will have some expectations for a what a word processor is and what features it should include such as compatibility with their current MS Word documents, their fonts, their printers, and their other applications.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Adobe is onto something here. It’s pretty cool when applications run online. I love using Wordpress, Flickr, Ning …come to think of it, about half of the applications I use are already online. These applications are excellent, not only because they’re accessible from any computer, but also because I don’t have to worry about software updates. Upgrades happen silently in the background. The best online applications are also mashable meaning they run within or along side other online applications. Unfortunately, despite the advances of Flash and AJAX, the bottle neck is still the web browser. For that reason, online applications like Flickr are expanding their off-line application components.
If Adobe is to successfully transition to Software as a Service (SaaS) it needs to ditch the legacy Software as a Product thinking. Rather than trying to replicate stand alone applications in a browser, they should be making their current products into services. You would still download and install the applications, but you pay a yearly service fee and updates happen in the background. The feature set could be split up for beginners and pros and Photoshop could plug-in to online services like Flickr but also work off-line. While they’re at it, why not also create a Photoshop server with an open API? Imagine being able to call up an online Photoshop filter to batch edit images on your website when needed? Now this is SaaS as it should be, breaking the rules of traditional software as a product. Don’t be afraid, you can do it Adobe!
[tags]MS-Word, buzzword, Corel, Adobe[/tags]
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Business, Innovation, SaaS
Adobe, buzzword, corel, ms-word
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