Why Buzzword and Google Docs Are Different Animals

PDF Version

Adobe's charging hard into the online word processor market with Buzzword, and the app's creator hopes that its WYSIWYG interface—and hooks into Adobe Reader—will help it triumph as the formative market declares its allegiances

Adobe rolled out Buzzword, an online word processor, last week as part of its Acrobat.com suite of services accompanying the release of Acrobat 9.
Buzzword has a tight interface, with horizontally expanding and collapsing buttons that keep the browser environment clutter-free while packing in a lot of features. It imports files from many standard office apps, exports to PDF, and offers the collaboration and review features of its competitors. On top of that, Buzzword adds basic web-conferencing via Acrobat.com's ConnectNow.

Its biggest differentiator, however says Rick Treitman, former CEO of Buzzword's creator Virtual Ubiquity, is that it's WYSIWYG: What's on screen is exactly what prints out, without need for the "print previews" of ancient desktop word processors from the 1980s and many current online word processors—Google Docs included—require in order to determine things like where page breaks fall and how (and where) graphics will render.

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WYSIWYG capability was the main priority for the team who built Buzzword, guided by their previous experiences working with Lotus Manuscript and Interleaf, both document tools. To accomplish that, they had to forget about leveraging the web browser's built-in HTML editing tools or building in AJAX, as both have limited awareness of—and compatibility with—printers. They wrote the app from scratch in Flex and designed it to run on Flash.

"The first thing we felt needed to be done was real-time pagination," says Treitman, a software veteran who worked at Lotus before starting Virtual Ubiquity, which Adobe acquired last year, retaining him as an entrepreneur-in-residence. "So we wrote a pagination engine that sets the page with every keystroke exactly the way it's going to print out.... All of us had been in the business a long time; we've all been looking for a great virtual machine. It turns out the Flash Player is that great virtual machine."

The online word processor market is a strange, new place: While Google Docs and competing tools get plenty of coverage in publications like eWeek, only a small fraction of office workers seem to be aware of them—and many fewer claim to use them at all. That's because people have become so used to working in desktop apps such as Microsoft Word that it becomes difficult to change tools, as well as changing workflows to accommodate the new tools, Treitman says.

But desktop machines prove to be mortal document repositories when their hard drives crash, and workers who must access their documents from several locations and computers have found online repositories like the ones Google Docs and Buzzword host to be effective efficiency tools.

So people come to use the new tools, one by one. Treitman's hoping that Buzzword adoption will spread via the usual viral means, but its secret marketing weapon is its association with Acrobat and Reader, which together—like Flash—are on most of the world's computers.

"These applications are consumer adoptions at this point.... I think that individuals are discovering these online applications and are bringing them to the office, and the office is just in the process of waking up to them, seeing what they are, and starting to adopt them," Treitman says.

"I don't want to take credit for this thought—I think Google pointed it out—but [it's] just like the consumer adoption of the Apple II back when I was a young pup. They were carried in by analysts who didn't want to be captive to the glass house [of the mainframe or IBM PCs of the era]. Or instant messaging, which was pretty much discovered by pre-teens but now all office workers have it in their desks."

The big hurdle to online word processor adoption is the "online" part: How do you make them work when the wi-fi gets weak or the user's unplugged from Internet access? Google built that function into Docs with its Google Gears plug-in; Adobe's working on a 2.0 version of Buzzword that will run offline as a rich-Internet AIR app. The rats'-nest issue of seamlessly syncing changes across multiple users working offline—when they eventually log on again—is the logistical issue toughest to solve. But Treitman says they'll get it done.

Bye bye GAby MEnta