Office applications Toolkit

Adobe quashes Office-rival rumours

Tags:
Microsoft Office

Martin LaMonica CNET News.com

Published: 20 Aug 2007 15:17 BST

Adobe has quashed rumours that it will create an office productivity suite to rival Microsoft Office.

Mike Downey, Adobe's group manager for platform evangelism, hinted on Wednesday that the company might be about to develop such software.

Downey clarified the situation in an interview with ZDNet.co.uk's sister site CNET News.com on Friday. He said that Adobe would focus primarily on providing its development platform, AIR, rather than creating online Office-style applications.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) would allow start-up companies to develop their own web-based applications which could rival Microsoft Office.

Adobe's Flash Player is widely used on the web, and AIR lets web developers create desktop applications.

"Our primary focus is building a platform that allows developers to build great web-based applications," Downey said. "AIR is the ideal platform for building these types of web applications that are robust and powerful."

Adobe is itself using AIR to build some applications. The Adobe Media Player, which it announced earlier this year, is designed for watching internet videos. Even though it is an application, Adobe considers the media player part of the platform it provides to third parties who have the ability to customise it, Downey said.

Competition

How messy is your server room?

We're launching a contest to find the quintessential messy server room, with a fantastic prize up for grabs. So come on, show us how chaotic a server room can get!

At the same time, Adobe is encouraging start-ups to write sophisticated web applications that could be online alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Adobe is an investor in Virtual Ubiquity, a company that is writing a sophisticated online word processor built with Adobe's Flex development tools. The application, called Buzzword, runs on Flash and will run on AIR.

There are other online productivity tools such as web-based presentation application SlideRocket that use Flash, Downey noted.

Adobe is also looking to exploit AIR within its existing product line.

AIR, which is now in beta, is expected to be made available in the first quarter of next year.

ZDNet.co.uk's Richard Thurston contributed to this report.

Did you find this article useful?
0 out of 2 people found this useful

More In Office applications

Company/Topic Alerts

Create a new alert from the list below:

Related Jobs

WEB APPLICATIONS ADMINISTRATOR (SOAP, REST, JAVA, C, C++, C#, PYTHON, PERL, UNIX/LINUX)- Cambridge, South East

WEB APPLICATIONS ADMINISTRATOR (SOAP, REST, JAVA, C, C++, C#, PYTHON, PERL, UNIX/LINUX)- Cambridge, South East The EBI is currently running web ...

Senior Java Developer-Birmingham-33-38k

Are you an enthusiastic and hard working team player with the ability to utilise your skills to provide the best solutions in a fast moving ...

Web Designer Required (Adobe,Flash, Photoshop) - West Yorkshire - 29k

Technologies include: flash, photoshop, fireworks, CSS. The successful candidate will have at least 2 years commercial Web Design experience and will ...

Featured Talkback

Why do so many (virtually all) software packages think that they are so important that they have to be started automatically every time the computer boots? What is the largest number of "speed access", "update check", "camera download" and whatever other background programs you have ever seen running? Of those, how many did you really need?