Adobe: June 2008 Archives

Adobe's Acrobat.com is the PDF/Flash/Photoshop maker's entry in the free-of-charge online office suite wars.

Biggest competitor: The also-free Google Docs.

Real competitor: The far-from-free Microsoft Office.

While I don't think Google Docs has anything to worry about at the moment, Acrobat.com sure does look nice.

It makes extensive use of Flash, which could be good or bad, depending on how you feel about Flash.

Adobe, as the owner of Flash (and PDF, for that matter) probably feels pretty damn good about it.

I'm just scratching the surface of Acrobat.com, but I managed to create an account and this document above in the Buzzword application. I also found out that users get 5GB of space for their documents and other files. There are some restrictions on what you can stow with Adobe, but 5GB is still a lot of space.

One thing I do like about Acrobat.com: You can print a document without first making a PDF, but you can, if you like export a PDF (or in Word's .doc, XML and newer .docx formats, Rich Text Format, zipped HTML -- why zipped, I don't know -- and plain ol' text).

One thing I don't like: Passwords are limited to 12 characters in length. I like a longer password (please hold .... your snide comments ... or don't).

Like Google Docs, Acrobat.com is all about collaboration on documents, something I've found very handy in Google Docs.

As I said, I'm not ready to throw Google Docs overboard, especially since I don't know all that much about Acrobat.com and its Buzzword app, and am not a particularly huge fan of Flash, but it's nice to see Adobe innovating and doing something that doesn't cost $800 for a copy.

And while Buzzword seems to be part of a whole suite, I don't see the other icons on the Acrobat.com screen as being much more than supporting players to Buzzword itself.

Click on the picture below for a bigger view of the Acrobat.com main screen:

All I can say is that Google now has somebody breathing down its neck ... and it sure isn't Yahoo ...

And everybody from students to professionals has another way to create, format and store documents without being hassled by the man (i.e. paying for office software).

More on Adobe's Acrobat.com (all from ZDNet):

• Adobe's Acrobat.com could be an Office killer; Will interface matter?
• Screenshots: Adobe's Acrobat.com office suite
• Adobe merging desktop and web with Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com

And I almost forgot to mention Adobe's free online photo-editing program Photoshop Express, which doesn't do what I need it to do (namely size JPEGs by pixels) but might do what you want it to do.