It doesn’t take long to see the difference between where Google is coming from and where we are going with Acrobat.com. This tweet from a few weeks ago is one pithy perspective:
“I must admit Adobe’s Buzzword looks like creamy, fattening butter next to trim, healthy margarine GDocs. But I like butter…” – @mahyuni
I love seeing that sort of emotional response to Buzzword and Acrobat.com. At the risk of dangerously mixing saturated fat and cardiac metaphors, I think the reason people respond so deeply to Acrobat.com, even in its early “unfinished” stage, is that we believe great designs engage both hearts and minds.
Acrobat.com is growing like gang busters, with over 100,000 new people signing up each week. This is happening even though we are still in beta and have a long way to go before the product is “done.” Why is this happening, who is using online collaboration to change the way people work together, and what we are doing to make Acrobat.com the best choice out there?
First let me set some context, using a picture from the early 1830s. I first saw a similar picture in a business history class with Professor Richard Tedlow:
From wikipedia:
“The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations … is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.”
The Acrobat.com Ideas site (http://ideas.acrobat.com) is available now for YOUR ideas, your comments and, very importantly, your VOTES. This is an experiment for us: a new way of gathering ideas, getting feedback on the ideas, and letting you tell us which are the ideas most important to you. Will this be effective? Inspirational? Yes. Absolutely. Please help us explore by adding your ideas. And vote early and often.
The Latest Release of Buzzword – Check It Out!
The Buzzword team is excited about our latest release. There are some terrific new features that many of you have requested – seeing the differences between versions of a document, justified text, and the ability to export to EPUB, for eBook publishing to devices like the iPhone with Stanza, Sony Reader and Adobe Digital Editions! And for our Macintosh users, there’s support for Safari 4 (beta.) Read more about this release via a Buzzword Open Access document. There’s no need to sign in to Buzzword (or even to have an account, for that matter) to read the document. So, feel free to pass the link along to colleagues and friends.