Mimeo Lounge

Buzzword: Adobe Acquires Virtual Ubiquity

Posted on October 4, 2007 at 2:53pm, written by Keith Miller, Director, Integrated Marketing

On October 1st, Adobe formerly announced their plans to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, the makers of the highly praised online word processor Buzzword.  The official Adobe press release contained the following statement: “Buzzword, an elegant online word processor, enables individuals to work together to create high quality, page perfect documents.” The choice of the phrase “page perfect documents” is interesting.  Here’s why.

The concept of shifting your word processing workspace from desktop to browser is nothing new.  A lot of us are familiar with Zoho Writer and Google Docs.  Even though they lack some of the advanced features of MS Word, they appeal to us for their “anywhere access”, WSYWIG editors, and sharing and collaboration capabilities.  All great benefits if you’re creating an online only deliverable.  What happens if you want to print a physical document that matches exactly what you see on screen?  Seems easy enough, right?  Trust me, it’s not.  The formatting gets all jumbled, and nine times out of ten what comes off your printer looks nothing like what you see on screen.  And for those of you who took the time to read Charlie Corr’s presentation “Hot Off the Press: Why Print Still Works in Learning”, we all know viewing documents on screen is not going to replace the printed medium anytime soon.

Emily Chang, a co-founder of Ideacodes, puts it best on her blog when she said “Google Docs is not the place to print your final sales proposal from. With Buzzword, it’s WYSIWYP. (That “P” is for “print”.) Virtual Ubiquity recognized that there is more to a document than the words. In many cases, the appeal of the printed page, determined by careful layout, is as valuable as the text...” That’s why Adobe’s choice of the phrase “page perfect documents” is so interesting.  It seems to allude to the fact they recognize that although people may be willing to overlook anemic feature sets for access and collaboration advantages, no sales, marketing, or training professional is going to exclusively create documents online if they can’t produce perfectly printed replicas offline.

That being said, Buzzword seems rather promising.  Sign up for the Beta here, and after you had a chance to test it out, let us know your thoughts.

Tags: adobe, buzzword, charlie corr, google docs, virtual ubiquity, wsywig, zoho writer