I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
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Adobe buys Buzzword
Posted by Rod in Google, Microsoft, TechBiz at 7:39 pm on Monday, 1 October 2007

TonyR from work alerted me to BuzzWord just a few days ago. It’s Word Processor developed in Flash. Now I’m not really a huge fan of sandboxed Flash apps in a Browser, but BuzzWord is simply stunning. Try the demo.

http://preview.getbuzzword.com/

Anyhoo, they’ve been acquired by Adobe pre-launch.

“Flex and Flash were the means to where we want to go. No one else realized how powerful it was as a virtual machine,” Treitman said.

I think this is a significant acquisition for a few of reasons:

  1. On line collaborative document space is wide open.  Google has some offerings but just haven’t pulled it together. Microsoft has not yet made its Office crown jewels really collaborative. Buzzword shows how it could be and there is still plenty of room for innovation even in what you would think is a mature space.
  2. Unifying a design led approach with great developers can deliver world class products and services with a small team.
  3. Buzzword could have come out of New Zealand.  It didn’t, but we have locally all the skills to play.
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Comments(3)

    Comment by max at 11:18 pm on 1 October 2007

    Browser based apps have 2 main problems: fonts and printing. Even average complexity layouts won’t come out right. Choices we enjoy in the print dialog for desktop apps are not available there. It’s a true tree-saving technology :-)




    Comment by Ben Kepes at 9:39 am on 2 October 2007

    we’ve got the skills but lack the environment - we need more VC’s, more angels and more mentors (present company excepted of course!)




    Comment by Campbell at 1:05 pm on 2 October 2007

    @max, The next version of the flash player is vastly improving the text engine which should see it use a lot more of the native OS technologies in all platforms which is a big plus: http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1062. They have a large focus on it for the v10.0 player which may be driven by this latest acquisition.

    And I think the main problem with printing is that most developers/companies don’t focus on it, as the technologies are there but seldom used.

    @Rod Yep we certainly have the talent as several high profile startups made with the Flex framework on top of the Flash player (like Buzzword) have actually been made by local development houses. I think in terms of the international market its the same old story, we are recognized as some of the best but we never quite manage to make it out of the local market.

    I welcome any questions