Last month I posted an article exploring Cloud Computing, which described the rise of web-based applications or services as a challenge to packaged, locally installed, applications. Google has been a well-established participant in this arena with their Google Apps, Yahoo! has a few in their arsenal and Microsoft has thrown their hat into the ring with Windows Live.
I came across an article on the The Register that announced Adobe's recent acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity and their flagship product, Buzzword, a Flash-based word processor, sounds like a real promising application:
"Currently, Buzzword will export documents to Word format and Word 2003 XML, and Adobe has promised support for Open Office format and its own PDF. The developers only integrated a spellchecker in the last month, however."
The most intriguing thing about this is the intent for making many of these applications available offline:
"The move is less about taking on Microsoft and Google in the office software business, and more about Adobe's masterplan for web apps. It's hoping the blingy Buzzword interface will provide a launch pad for its AIR runtime environment for Flash applications, which should allow users to edit their documents offline. Google has the same idea to take its application suite offline with Google Gears."
To me that sounds more like trying to make the local applications "thin", rather than have them entirely web-based. What do you think about all this? Could something like this replace your "office" suite of applications?
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