10F9A6B1-4A4A-4E12-9925-AE9AA7020AF8.jpg

Adobe continue their loving embrace of the Web with three key announcements:

1. Purchasing Virtual Ubiquity, creators of Buzzword

Buzzword is Yet Another Online Word Processing Application that has a slick Flash based interface. If this is the quality of applications that can be built on the nascent Flex framework then the smart money would be on it having a strong future.

2. Public release of AMP - Adobe Media Player

AMP is a free desktop media player that will allow users to stream, download, manage, and play rich media content.

Already signed up as content providers are CBS, Yahoo! Video and PBS but perhaps the most interesting announcement is that Adobe will permit co-branded versions to to allow publishers to create custom application, possibly funded by adverts or integrated payment (subscription based?) for content.

3. Preview release of Adobe Share

Adobe Share sees Adobe enter the crowded world of online document sharing, providing users with 1GB of free, secure storage space.

As with Buzzword, Adobe’s selling point with Share appears to be the sheer loveliness of the UI.

Conclusion

It’s an interesting situation, one can see parallels between Apple vs. Microsoft and Adobe vs. Google, where the latter are ubiquitous but the former simply have cooler applications. Whatever the outcome, Adobe continue to have a strong 2007 technically, the next step will be convincing the masses that their tools are worth using.