What Adobe is Thinking with Acrobat Site

PDF Version

Will Buzzword cut into Create PDF online? Will free PDF authoring in Buzzword cut into desktop Acrobat user base? Adobe exec answers these—and other—questions that came up in the wake of this week's Acrobat.com online services rollout.

In going online with a relaunched Acrobat.com site this week, Adobe's skating a fine line between enhancing the desktop experience and cannibalizing the lucrative seats—now up to a suggested retail of $699 a pop for Acrobat Extended Pro—with a suite of free services that pieces off some of Acrobat's PDF authoring and web conferencing features.


For now, Create PDF Online offers the same free authoring of a limited number of PDFs as it has for the last several years. New is the Buzzword word processor, which also can create free PDFs but is more limited in what it can import. That makes it a separate animal from Create PDF Online, says Mark Grilli, Acrobat.com group product marketing manager.

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ConnectNow gives Acrobat.com users a taste of Acrobat's web-conferencing tools, and Share represents a document sharing service where others can interact in document editing.

Behind the scenes at Adobe, there had to have been some spirited discussion about whether enabling free PDF export in the free Buzzword online word processor or being able to launch a version of Connect outside the Acrobat box would woo potential paying customers away. Or would it work as a marketing tool to draw in more potential users?

"We think it will be an enhancement to the Acrobat brand, in that it will bring more users into the fold," says Grilli, who adds he feels that the collaboration tools and online document repositories at Acrobat.com will show non-Acrobat users just how much the application itself can do with PDFs.

Google Docs changed the PDF authoring game when it made PDF export as a feature of its free word processor. Grilli—like his peers at Corel, who earlier this year said that Google Docs' mindshare among office workers is relatively low—thinks that Adobe isn't necessarily competing head-to-head with Google Docs; there's plenty of market space to share at this point.

"Our understanding—in doing market research and talking to knowledge workers—it's not so much a switching problem, we're not trying to convince people to switch from Google Docs," Grilli says. "It's getting new people in the fold."

People, he continues, who are now circulating "15 versions of the same document" via email, collecting comments and annotations, and reconciling them in a final version. Acrobat.com strives to make an online home for documents—PDF and otherwise—where everyone is literally on the same page and users don't waste time syncing up different versions of their work.

"We had a woman we were interviewing who spent 80% of her time [reconciling revisions from emailed documents]," Grilli says. "When you're working on one version of the document in the cloud, it removes the need to do all of that—it really is a new way to think about doing things."

One cue Adobe's taking from Google is the public beta aspect of the rollout of online tools. Unlike Google—which seems to be in a permanent state of public beta—Grilli says Adobe has an endgame. After that point, the company will likely charge for some of the services that are currently free during the test phase. Adobe promises, however, that there will always be a free version of Buzzword available at Acrobat.com.

Another interesting facet of Acrobat.com is the AIR version, a runtime desktop app that functions outside the browser. In the current iteration, Buzzword does not function offline, but that's a possibility for future revs.

On first blush, the AIR runtime edition seems like a distant third cousin to Acrobat, a far outpost from the mothership. Upon closer examination, however, its upside is fascinating: Not only is Adobe eating its own cooking by manufacturing an interesting use case for its authoring tools—but if Buzzword runs offline and syncs up when the user jumps back on the Internet, it will be a huge competitive advantage that would entice users of other online word processors like Google Docs and their ilk to dump them and make Acrobat.com their main axe.

"The benefit to the average user, today, is that you can drag and drop things from your desktop—it's an efficiency tool, an access point that's similar to the browser experience," says Grilli who adds that an offline-enabled Buzzword is in the works. "Down the road, we're going to have much more to offer—offline capabilities, and functions that are currently not available."

Saludos, GAby Menta