News

Adobe unveiled Acrobat.com, an online suite that allows you to create word processing documents, share files, convert PDFs and hold Web conferences.

Analysis

On first glimpse, Acrobat.com looks really snazzy and bests other online productivity suites such as Google Docs and Zoho. The online suite supports Acrobat 9 which was also announced on Monday. Acrobat 9 now includes support for Flash and is in some ways the culmination of Adobe’s Macromedia acquisition. The killer application in the suite is ConnectNow, the collaboration tool. ConnectNow allows people to collaborate, share screens and work together and should help companies reduce travel (be more green).

Strategic Impact

In some ways, Acrobat.com is a late entrant in this space with Google being the current favorite. Besides, Acrobat is still far from a complete productivity suite and does not have spreadsheets and presentation programs. Even Microsoft has OfficeLive Spaces that allows users to collaborate and share documents online. Besides OfficeLive is well integrated with Microsoft Office suite.

Recommendation

Admittedly Acrobat.com has the easiest user interface and that should help drive adoption. That coupled with the wide deployment of Acrobat and Flash should make it an easy learning curve for users. But with an incomplete stack and no compelling features that are currently not offered by competitors, users are advised to wait and watch.