Perspectives

Today we take a big step towards realizing our vision of a new way to work on Acrobat.com.

Today we end the public beta for Acrobat.com. We launch Acrobat.com Premium subscriptions for more intensive business use (yes, the free version of the service is still available, and still free :-). And we give a look into the future of Acrobat.com for the coming year, starting with the unveiling of our spreadsheet product, Acrobat.com Tables, on our Labs website. Lots of news! Oh, plus two weeks ago we released Acrobat.com Presentations.

We're busy because our customers are busy.

Continue reading "Hello (Business) World - Welcome to a New Way to Work" »

It's not that we are smarter or more creative. It's not because we like each other more. It's because we've found a new way to work.

We get more work done, much better than your team, in much less time, because we use Acrobat.com.

And from a personal standpoint, by working this way I get fewer emails and spend less time in meetings, yet I get more done, have more time to think, and enjoy my work and my co-workers more. How does that sound to you?

Let me give you a real world example of how this happens.

Continue reading "Why our team can beat your team" »

Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? The Acrobat.com team recently completed a survey with Directions Research, Inc. that points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century.

Continue reading "The Future of Work - good-bye martini lunches, hello working poolside" »

There has been some commentary about SharePoint over the past couple weeks that helps mark the path we are taking with Acrobat.com, so I thought I would weigh in.

To some extent, Acrobat.com owes its success so far to the SharePoint story. No, we don't use SharePoint, and we don't directly integrate with it either (maybe someday). But SharePoint has introduced people to the promise of better collaboration, or as Thomas Vander Wal said, it is acting as the "gateway drug to enterprise social tools." And at the same time it has opened up an opportunity for Acrobat.com to actually deliver on the promise of better social collaboration at work without the pitfalls that Dion Hinchcliffe recently described as "the issues and challenges of using SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0."

A recent survey we did of Acrobat.com users highlighted the gap between the big promises and meager payoffs of Enterprise 2.0 so far. I think this is the most interesting statistic:

There are as many people who have stopped using SharePoint for sharing and collaborating on documents as there are people currently using it.

Continue reading "SharePoint, Enterprise 2.0 and Acrobat.com" »

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.

Continue reading "Google Docs, Acrobat.com and Great Design" »

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:

Continue reading "What 100K People a Week Tell Us...about the future of collaboration" »

Have you ever had the experience of traveling - either across town or across the country - only to realize you'd left a critical file on your computer in the office or at home? The scenario is so common that for decades an entire market segment has thrived around making data portable. Floppy disks (if you remember), Bernoulli disks, thumb drives, other external drives, now even cell phones and PDAs are used to transport files between computers. The more web-centric approach has been to email files to yourself, or get an account on Box.net or a related service - such as Acrobat.com. There are three scenarios in which Acrobat.com addresses the challenge of what could be called content mislocation.

Continue reading "The Virtue of Ubiquity" »

(This entry is authored by Ruchi Kumar, a graduate student at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, working as a business systems analyst here at Adobe for a summer internship.)

So who does the Acrobat.com services benefit? One possible scenario is for students at grad schools (like me!). Many courses are project oriented with typical team sizes of 3-4 people. This brings up the scheduling issue - with everyone having their own busy schedules and priorities, it gets difficult to setup a time and space where all can physically meet. In the past, we were forced to juggle with a wide range of collaboration tools to solve these concerns.

Continue reading "A great way to accomplish a school project!" »

If you've been following the Acrobat.com press, or reading our marketing materials, or checking our blog and forum, you've seen that we are very focused on enabling collaboration - especially when documents are involved. Here's a quick look at the ways we enable collaboration.

Collaboration in Authoring
The story begins with document authoring, and in Buzzword we've heard countless people indicate that Buzzword is the finest online writing experience currently available. Many have told us they've even abandoned Word - some use the expression "liberated" - in favor of Buzzword as their primary writing environment.

Buzzword is indeed a simple and elegant word processor, but it really differentiates from Word and other desktop applications when you want to collaborate with others in the writing process. Instead of pushing documents out to others via email, you simply invite your collaborators to the only instance of the document, online, where they can contribute content or just add comments.

With everyone working on the same document, rather than multiple, disparate copies of the document, then collaboration is smoother and you can keep track of everyone's involvement. The image below shows the Buzzword collaborator bar, which displays who has read the document, when they read it and which version they read. Now that's getting everyone on the same page!

Continue reading "Document Collaboration" »

Wow, glad to have that behind us, now back to work changing the way people work, for the better!

Thanks for all the attention, but you people should stop surfing the web over breakfast coffee and before and after lunch, and spread your tire-kicking out a little! Just kidding, that's life on the web and we were mostly ready for it, but it is pretty tense watching the sun rise over the world on a launch day like Monday.

I'll come back to more details on the "mostly" stuff and lessons learned sometime soon, but I wanted to give a quick update on how things are going, and clarify some stray memes about Acrobat.com that are flying around on the series of tubes serving the web.

Continue reading "Now the real work begins." »

There was an unfortunate news report today on CNet (Zoho Writer search bug exposed private documents) about a security problem with our fellow web application ZOHO Writer. Martin LaMonica wrote about a very brief security violation, that was caused by some bad timing in their server indexing and testing process.

Continue reading "Securing Web-based Documents" »

There was a post yesterday by Randall Kennedy entitled “Streaming Office: Death knell for Google Apps?http://blogs.zoho.com/in-the-news/streaming-office-vs-true-web-apps/” in which he posited that Microsoft’s new effort to make Office available as a service will obviate the need and opportunity for on-line apps, a category that obviously includes Buzzword.

Continue reading "Streaming Office: Missing the Point" »

We heard about a Buzzword user recently who happily created a document on-line and after getting through the first draft, he promptly exported the document to a Word file and sent it to his collaborators as an email attachment.

Continue reading "Work Different" »

One area where Buzzword has been very popular is in educational settings. We had hoped for just this scenario when we first conceived the product because academia is where you find users who:

* Write a lot
* Write from multiple locations, often on different computers
* Write together with fellow students
* Share their work with reviewers (often teachers)
* And, finally, care about the quality of the writing experience and the printed output.

Because Buzzword documents are stored on the web, it’s easy to allow others to read, review or even co-author them. You don’t have to email your documents to others; just invite collaborators to your shared document, and you will all be working on the same version.

It couldn’t be easier to start using Buzzword - the sign up process takes about 15 seconds. Just go to www.buzzword.com and click on the “Sign Up” link in the upper right corner of the screen, then fill in a few fields and get started.

Continue reading "Buzzword for Education" »

Buzzword is often compared with Google Docs, so it might be useful to discuss the relationship between them - both the similarities and the differences. The short version goes like this:

Similarities:

• Free web apps. Buzzword and Google Docs are both driving the move to on-line applications, and are rapidly gaining popularity and market share.


• Comments and Collaboration. Ubiquitous access to your documents enable better collaboration, and both tools have useful commenting functionality to support this.

Differences:

• Layout and Pagination. Google Docs has the sophistication of Notepad, with no page payout or pagination capability. Buzzword, on the other hand, shows a true and accurate representation of the page in real time.


• Experience matters! Buzzword’s user experience is rich and elegant, rewarding users and encouraging authors to write more.

Continue reading "Buzzword vs. Google Docs" »

Here’s another way we think Buzzword might be useful in working on documents, whether you’re working alone or in a group setting. One measure of whether this post might be useful for you is the number of paper clips that are visible in your Inbox.

In other words, if your Inbox is choked with messages that contain attachments, especially if those attachments are Word documents, then Buzzword is worth considering.

Continue reading "Email as Document Repository?" »

It almost goes without saying these days that when there’s collaborative authoring and editing work to be done, email is the channel that supports the process. We have become so accustomed to emailing documents around, that we have become generally inured to just how hideous the process can be.

Continue reading "Email is not a Collaboration Platform" »

Disruptive innovations often initially result in worse performance compared with established products and services in mainstream markets. But disruptive innovations have other benefits. They are often cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use. After taking root in a simple, undemanding application, disruptive innovations inexorably get better until they change the game, relegating previously dominant firms to the sidelines in often stunning fashion.

–Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovators Dilemma

Since Monday’s press announcement of Adobe’s pending acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity we’ve seen a storm of coverage by analysts, bloggers, and the press. Most of it has been extremely positive and encouraging. And it’s resulted in our servers being bombarded by what used to be called “The Slashdot Effect”. Only in this case it’s the total blogosphere/press effect.

Continue reading "Disruptive Word Processing" »