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Adobe plans to acquire Buzzword's owners, Virtual Ubiquity, in a bid to enable hundreds of millions of users of Adobe Acrobat software to work together publishing shared documents.

Buzzword, one of a new class of rich internet applications (RIAs), was built by an 11-member team in Waltham, Massachusetts, who helped create the 1980s-era Manuscript, the successor to Lotus's ground-breaking 1-2-3 spreadsheet.

"We were looking for a technology to create a modern word processor," says Erik Larson, Adobe's director of marketing and product management. "The problem of collaborating on documents is not solved and we think we can solve it."

Melissa Webster, an analyst with market research firm IDC, says many people's initial reaction to design tools maker Adobe entering the word processing market will be: "What? Adobe?"

"The industry knows Adobe for its creative tools. We don't think of Adobe in the category of enterprise software vendors that might be going after Microsoft Office," Webster says.

Adobe's Buzzword acquisition is the latest in a string of online threats to Microsoft's Office software. In addition to established rivals such as Google Docs and Zoho, IBM launched its own online office suite last month.

Radical departure

Buzzword

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marks a radical break with Adobe's usual document-centric publishing by letting users collaborate on shared documents and allowing individual users to save data or format changes online.

It is an early example of Adobe's AIR software that works both online and offline on computer desktops. Buzzword features high-quality typography, advanced graphic capabilities and page-layout controls that text editors on the web all lack.

Adobe executives claim Buzzword could help raise consumer expectations about what is possible using word processors.

"Buzzword looks the same whether it is running in a Web browser or as a desktop application," says IDC's Webster. "Google doesn't solve this problem. Microsoft doesn't solve this problem. IBM doesn't solve it."

In a related move, Adobe has set up a new file-sharing service to its existing line of online document services. Codenamed "Share," the new Adobe service lets people share, publish and organize documents online.

Users select the documents they want to share, send a message to recipients and determine whether to let their files be publicly accessible or restricted.

Adobe officials haven't spell out how the company plans to distribute Buzzword, but claim it will eventually be tied to its document management software used widely in business.

"We have a lot of opportunity to expose a lot of people to Buzzword very quickly," Larson says. "We are definitely going to integrate Buzzword into PDF workflows."

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of November. Adobe says the Virtual Ubiquity deal is not expected to have a material impact on its results in fiscal 2007. The founders of Virtual Ubiquity have agreed to join Adobe.

Users will be able to import or export documents from rival word processor programs into Buzzword, which is compatible with Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.