Adobe to Acquire Virtual Ubiquity
Adobe announced tonight that they have arrived at a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity, creator of the Buzzword online word processor. As described previously on Radar, Rick Treitman , former Lotus word processing manager and sometime proprietor of Softpro Books, heard me give one of my early Web 2.0 riffs to a group of booksellers, and realized that he needed to get back in the game.
Congratulations to Rick on the sale, and to Adobe on the acquisition! Buzzword really does blow away any other online word processor. Virtual Ubiquity likes to describe it as the "first real online word processor," and in many ways they are right. The quality of the typography, the layout, and the whole user experience are far ahead of other online word processors like Google Docs. And of course that's why Adobe is interested, because Buzzword shows off just how much richer an application can be when it's done with Adobe's Integrated Runtime (AIR).
What Buzzword has that no other online word processor matches includes such features as flowing text around pictures, drag and drop table layout, fabulous typography, and a smooth, quick UI. Take a look at the page below from Buzzword's own online documentation:
(Buzzword provides its documentation in Buzzword itself. Each new user gets a copy of the documentation, complete with instructions for things to try on that very document to learn the features. It makes for a great learning experience, since it's a sandbox as well as a manual. Buzzword also has the cutest-ever sleep message. If you leave your document open too long without any activity, Buzzword goes to sleep, with the baby shown above appearing in its place. Makes me smile every time I see it.)
Despite its superiority, Buzzword has lagged behind Google Docs (originally Writely) in adoption. This was partly due to the fact that Google Docs was first to market, but is also a testament to the market power of Google, and to the fact that in the Web 2.0 era, success is all about network effects.
Being first has always mattered. (See Ries and Trout's first law in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.) What's more, software has always been subject to network effects, in which the most widely used application becomes more and more dominant, just because it's more widely used, much as someone like Paris Hilton is famous for being famous. To the extent that any work product of the application is shared, the switching cost involves moving everyone that you already work with onto the new platform. That's why it was so hard for anyone to make a dent in the supremacy of Microsoft office, especially with proprietary file formats.
But in the Web 2.0 era, there is a new dimension. Now the software is free to all, so there's a much lower barrier to switching. But there's still a barrier in the form of existing documents in proprietary non-portable formats, and also in the community of users who have access to the application. Sharing a document with someone in the same network is easier than adding a new user, who has to sign up for an identity before they can begin to use the application.
As a result, one of Adobe's priorities has got to be to make it easy for people to try buzzword and their other products without signing up for and managing yet another online identity. I've asked if they'll be supporting OpenId but haven't heard back yet. It's not a huge barrier to register, but it turns a one-click process into a multi-click process, and every additional click will likely lose some potential users.
Right now, Buzzword has its own sign-in, separate from Adobe's other online products. (See related announcement.) Clearly the two will need to be integrated. But I hope they'll go further, and rather than trying to build their own identity base, just recognize any openID provider.
In any event, the acquisition will certainly put Buzzword much more strongly on the map. It will no longer be one more startup trying to compete with Google and Microsoft, but a part of a much larger company that has a unique angle on publishing and the sharing of all kinds of documents.
Years ago, Henry McGilton told me about what he called "the three F's": "First, Fabulous, or F***ed." (We can sanitize that to "First, Fabulous, or Forget It.") Buzzword wasn't first, but it is fabulous, and I hope that that's good enough that it escapes the fate of the third F.
tags: adobe, buzzword, google, web2.0, wordprocessing
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Alex Linhares [10.06.07 04:46 AM]
A Modest (billion-dollar) proposal
Imagine the following scenario. A secretive meeting, years ago, when Apple´s Steve Jobs, the benevolent dictator, put in place a strategy to get into the music business. It included not only a gadget, but also an online store, iTunes. I have no idea how that meeting went, but one thing is for sure: many people afterwards must have been back-stabbing Jobs, and mentioning "the music business? We´re going to sell music? This guy has totally lost it."
Fact of the matter was, technology had forever changed the economics of the music business, and Jobs could see it.
Having said that, I´d like to make a modest, billion-dollar, proposal, to the likes of Adobe, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and whomever else might be up to the task.
Cui Bono?
Think about science publishing. I publish papers for a living. My first paper came out in Biological Cybernetics, a journal which cost, in 1998, over US$2000 for a one year subscription. I live scared to death of Profa. Deborah, who reviews my scientific output. And there are others like me in this world. Oh yes, many others.
The economics of science publishing is completely crazy for this day and age. Authors give enormous effort to bring their work to light, editors and journal and conference referees also put in enormous effort. All of that is unpaid, of course (or at least indirectly paid, in the hopes of tenure and/or prestige). But then, our masterpieces go to a journal, which obliges me to transfer copyright to the likes of Elsevier, or Springer, or someone else. Then some money starts to show up! According to wikipedia, Springer had sales exceeding €900 million in 2006, while Elsevier upped the ante to a pre-tax profit (in the REED annual report) to a staggering €1 billion (on €7.9 Billion turnover). But for those who brought out the scientific results, for those that bring the content, and the fact checking by referees and editors, all that work goes unpaid. The money goes to those who typeset it, then store it in a server, then print it out and mail it to libraries worldwide. And let´s not forget those which actually pay for the research, the public, as most research is government-financed. In the words of Michael Geist, a law professor:
Cancer patients seeking information on new treatments or parents searching for the latest on childhood development issues were often denied access to the research they indirectly fund through their taxes
How did we get here? A better question is how could it have been otherwise? In the last decades, how could a different industrial organization appear? Cui Bono?
Lowly (and busy) professors or universities were obviously not up to the risky and costly task of printing and mailing thousands of journals worldwide, every month. A few societies emerged, and, mostly funded by their membership, they were up to the task. So, in time, the business of science publishing emerged and eventually consolidated in the hands of a few players. And these few players could focus on typesetting, printing, mailing much better than the equation-loving professors or the prestige & money-seeking universities.
The other day I tried to download my own paper published in the journal " Artificial Intelligence", and I was asked to pay USD30.00 for it. That´s the price of a book, and I was the author of the thing in the first place!
Now, if you ask me, technology has forever changed the economics of the scientific publishing business, and it´s high time for someone like Jobs to step forward.
Adobe Buzzword is specially suited to do this. Most scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer) and societies (IEEE, ACM, APA, APS, INFORMS) have just one or two typesetting styles for papers. I imagine a version of Buzzword which carries only the particular typesetting style(s) of the final published document, and researchers would already prepare those manuscripts ready for publication (there are glitches today, of course, like high-quality images and tables and equations--but hey, we´re talking about Adobe here!). A submit button would submit the papers for evaluation, either to a journal or a conference. Referees could make comments and annotation on the electronic manuscript itself, or even suggest minor rewritings of a part here and there. The process would be much smoother than even the most modern of online submission processes. And, since Adobe has flash, this means that they´re especially positioned to bring up future papers with movies, sounds, screencasts and whole simulations embedded. Wouldn´t that be rich? Doesn´t that beautifully fit with what´s stated in their page?
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information .
But Buzzword is just my favorite option (because it enables beautiful typesetting, is backed by a large, credible, player, works on any platform, and enables worldwide collaboration between authors, editors, referees). Other options could be desktop processors (MsWord, Pages, OpenOffice, etc). There would be a productivity gain by using something the likes of Buzzword, but using desktop processors wouldn´t affect the overall idea.
Now, why would the people in Adobe, Yahoo, SUN, IBM, Microsoft, Google, or others actually want to do a thing like that?
There are two reasons. The first one is goodwill, the second one is money.
Goodwill
I recently had a paper outright rejected in the IBM Systems Journal. In retrospect, I now see that it was a very bad call to submit there. I had mentioned that choice to the editor of a very prestigious scientific journal, and he responded by saying: "They´re going to hate it. They´re not in the business of publishing great original science for a long time now. That´s just a marketing thing; they´re in the business of trying to impress customers." I responded that I thought that they´d be open-minded; that the journal had had some great contributions in the past and I thought it was just great. I was, of course, wrong. They didn´t even look at the thing; they didn´t even bother to send back a message. After a quick check, I felt enormously stupid: all papers, or maybe not all but something way above 90%, come from IBM authors. The IBM Systems Journal, it seems to me, is now a branch of IBM´s marketing department. And while it may impress less sophisticated customers, it´s definitely a huge loss for IBM.
The Systems Journal (and their R&D journal) used to be a fountain of goodwill for IBM. Scientists took pride in publishing there, and hordes of researchers (not customers) browsed it and studied it carefully. It was a fountain of goodwill--with a direct route to IBM´s bottom line: it attracted the best scientists to IBM. Now that it´s in the hands of marketing, you can hardly find any serious scientist considering it as a potential outlet. If I were in IBM, I´d be fighting to change things around. But I´m not there, I can speak the truth as I see it, and I can just submit somewhere else. The BELL LABS Technical Journal also seems to be meeting the same "marketing department" fate. Don´t expect to see nobel prizes coming from these journals any time soon.
When these journals didn´t belong to marketing, they brought, at least to this observer, a huge amount of goodwill and good publicity for their respective companies. The HR department must have loved choosing among the best PhDs dying to get into IBM. Sad to mention, I doubt that the best PhDs are now begging to work on these companies anymore.
Yet, IBM could change things around. As could Adobe, SUN, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and many others. What I feel they should do is establish a platform for online paper submission, review, and publication. This platform should be made openly available for all scientific societies, for free. From the prestigious journal "Cognitive Science" to the Asia-Pacific Medical Education Conference, this platform should be free (to societies, journals, and conferences) and the papers published online should be freely accessible to all, no login, no paywall, nothing in the way. Copyright should remain in the hands of authors. Gradually, one after another, journals and conferences would jump ship, as the platform gained credibility and respectability.
Now here´s the kicker. It´s not only about goodwill. There´s money to be made.
Money
One crucial point is for the platform to be freely accessible to all. But you can do that, and still block the googlebot, the yahoobot, and all others "bots", but your own. Let´s say, for instance, that Microsoft does something of the sort. In some years time, not only it gets the goodwill of graduate students who are studying papers published by science.microsoft.org (as opposed to hey-sucker-pay-thirty-bucks-for-your-own-paper-Elsevier), but also the way to search for such information would be only through that website. As we all know, advertising is moving online: according to a recent study, the last year saw "$24 billion spent on internet advertising and $450 billion spent on all advertising ". Soon we´ll reach US$100 Billion/year in advertising on the web. And imagine having a privileged position in the eyeballs of graduate-educated people, from medicine to science to economics to business to engineering to history.
I hope someone will pull something like this off. Maybe for the goodwill. Or maybe for the money.
Many companies could pull it off, but some seem specially suited to the task. My favorite would be Adobe--with buzzword and AIR and flash and pdfs, that´s definitely my choice. Google might want to do it just to preempt some other company from blocking the googlebot to get its hands on valuable scientific research. Microsoft, the Dracula of the day, certainly needs the goodwill, and it could help it to hang on to the MS-Word lock in. Maybe Amazon would find this interesting--fits nicely with their web storage and search dreams. Yahoo would have the same reason as Google.
I don´t see Apple doing it. I think it could actually hurt their market value, as investors might think that they would be over-stretching, ever expanding into new markets.
I don´t see IBM or SUN doing it either; in fact, if anyone in a board meeting ever proposed this, I can only see the exact same back-stabbing that must have gone through, years ago, in Apple: "Science-publishing? This guy has totally lost it. This is IBM, and that´s not the business we´re in." They´re to busy handling their own internal office politics, who´s getting promotion and pay packages. Innovation is hardly coming in from there (though both have been embracing open-source to a certain degree).
One thing is for sure. The open-access to research movement is getting momentum everyday. It´s time to sell that Elsevier stock.
Just a final note. If any player is willing to do this, use an org domain name. Don´t name it "Microsoft Science". That won´t work with intelligent, independent scientists. Use a domain name such as science.yahoo.org, science.adobe.org, and name it as "Open science", "World of Science", anything... but please don´t try to push your name too far. Let it grow slowly.
And just in case someone wants to pull this off, and is actually wondering... I´m right here.