Last month, Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity and many people including me had questioned the future of this product, since Buzzword, Virtual Ubiquity’s Flash-based word processor might bundle with some other Adobe products. Now, one month later, it looked like Adobe will only make this Web-based application for the better, new features are work in progress. On top of that, Buzzword is now opens to all the users without requiring any invitation code.

An user simply need to submit her name, email address and password, and Buzzword is ready to go. To get Buzzword, it is on the web at http://preview.getbuzzword.com. Meanwhile, I just typed a short document using Buzzword, as shown in the above picture.

Adobe has acquired a Waltham, Massachusetts based startup Virtual Ubiquity for an undisclosed sum, according to this blog. This startup was founded in June 2005 and made their name on the Web by created a Web-based word processor application that called Buzzword. Obviously, this acquisition did not took people by surprise since Adobe and Virtual Ubiquity have pre-existing software relationships as the Buzzword, still a test version was built on Adobe’s Flex framework and users must enable their browsers the installed of Flash Player 9. While I attended an Adobe training today, I was told that the team made up of Virtual Ubiquity’s success, i.e. eleven (11) people, half of whom worked at Lotus Development Corp. in the 1980s and 1990s will join the Adobe family. What are the likely repercussions of this acquisition in term of the product development of Adobe? It’s indeed too early to tell that.

Meanwhile, this acquisition has given new prominence to the Adobe and Microsoft, both companies’ previously hidden rivalry, with Adobe indisputably has every right to integrate the Buzzword word processor into their Adobe Acrobat family or LifeCycle platform. In fact, the competition and struggle for market share has not been standing still but intensified over the months after both companies, Adobe and Microsoft have released the desktop video player and rich media browser extension, i.e. Adobe Media Player that built on Apollo and Microsoft’s Silverlight at the same time in April this year. However, the acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity definitely has been a source of competitive advantage especially for Adobe, with plans to push for the Web office market.

Given the saturation of the Adobe’s existing markets for their core products which are Acrobat and Web design softwares, Adobe definitely seeks to expand into other fields. Things are getting more interesting now. While Adobe was still perceived as immature in developing its enterprise market, albeit that they believed the growth must come from the “enterprise market,” Adobe’s main strength was more likely to be appealed to the desktop buyers. They simply have no credibility to the enterprise buyers, especially for now. I’m sure they know building its integrated Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) software product line bundle with Buzzword is less difficult and yields profits faster than developing the products and solutions that geared toward the enterprise businesses.