I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Has anyone noticed what Adobe’s been doing lately?
Photoshop online, in Flash - watch the video. No wonder they brought Buzzword.
Adobe is quietly and steadily becoming a bigger player in Internet computing. I’d written off Flash as great for marketing sites but Adobe is driving Flash into a Virtual Machine. I would not have expected to see word processors and photo editors delivered over the web.
Adobes approach differs from Google. Google is sparse and light - more traditional web apps with lots of wizzy AJAX and CSS. Adobe is taking more of a design led approach with rich Flash applications. But there will be an front load time.
Microsoft should be leveraging their client advantage doing a Software + Services model. Collaborative Word. Imagine being able to jointly work on a Word document across the web. That’s what I want out of Word.
Microsoft of course has SilverLight - but will we see a SilverLight Word? I’m not sure that makes sense.
But no doubt Adobe has become a player and a charting quite a different model. It’s not a two horse race anymore.
blog
“Microsoft should be leveraging their client advantage doing a Software + Services model. Collaborative Word. Imagine being able to jointly work on a Word document across the web. That’s what I want out of Word.”
Rod - did you miss this announcement recently? http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/officelive/FX102394081033.aspx
It’s an online companion to your locally installed Office apps - lets you collaborate and over the internet and store documents in the cloud. Most analysts/bloggers have been bagging the service because it still requires you to have Office installed locally. But most people have Office installed locally, so it will appeal to them.
Its not just online solutions. The same source can be compiled into an AIR application, becoming a desktop application that is web aware. The now support all 3 major OS’s and are moving on embedded platforms. For example the Google analytics AIR app (link below) does a good job of showing how effective a web aware RIA can be in both data presentation and user interaction. Ebay have even started to get on the bandwagon (link below)
Take a look at the adobe media player built on the AIR platform (links below) which is another angle from adobe into the media industry, partnering with content providers. And now the flash player can play both FLV videos and fullscreen HD video.
The flash player will also be recieving p2p video and SIP based VOIP soon too.
And lastly the latest release of the mobile version of the flash player has similar capabilities but takes advantage of phone specific technologies. Media (video) is delivered from the same source but on the fly encoded for mobile viewing.
AIR:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
Google analytics app: http://www.aboutnico.be/index.php/google-analytics-air-beta-sign-up/
Ebay:
http://desktop.ebay.com/
Adobe media player:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mediaplayer/
VOIP:
http://pac.ifica.net/
http://merhl.com/?p=44 (flash player IPhone example with VOIP)
Hi Stuart. That’s my point. Checking and checking out of documents. Yawn. That’s a file system on the web.
I want to be working on the same document at the same time. Really use the power of the installed client.
If you think about it, documents are high contention. You have a team bursting on it for a few hours then its done.
We should be able to have a team of people collaborating, passing the pen, fixing grammar - all at once. I’d drop 80% of the features in word to have that. In fact I’d write online and take the upfront load time to have that.
More on adobe this morning …
http://www.news.com/Adobe-plots-its-path-on-the-Web/2008-1012_3-6211579.html?tag=nefd.top
If you would give up 80% of the features of Word for online collaboration - why not use Google Docs? It’s realtime collaboration is excellent IMO.
Well if you’re willing to lose 80% (maybe 90%) of Word’s features in order to collaborate online, then Google Docs is the way to go. I don’t think it’s much of a ‘word processor’ though - more like a rich text editor, but the collaborative features are top notch. You can have multiple people working on the same document at the same time, just requires a manual refresh to merge changes. Google Spreadsheets even has built-in chat support which is even better. I assume that Docs will be getting this feature at some point.
Personally I like Adobe AIR - Adobe’s method of bringing flash applications to the desktop environment. For a good application check out pownce http://www.pownce.com
Someone had tried Airpress? ( http://www.airpress.org/ )
We actually even have a Flex/AIR user group in New Zealand: http://groups.google.com/group/nzfxug
Coincidentally we’re currently running a Flex/AIR development competition for beginners and give away a few nice prizes. People who want to join have to sign-up to the group by end of the day, sorry for the short notice…
Competition details: http://groups.google.com/group/nzfxug/web/1st-new-zealand-flex-user-group-flex-air-development-competition
Cheers,
Kai