Adobe said that it would acquire Virtual Ubiquity, a company that developed a "ground-breaking online word processor" called Buzzword that runs on AIR. Although these terms might sound like the makings for a joke about vaporware, Adobe's AIR is a cross-platform runtime that enables online applications to be extended to the desktop.

The acquisition is part of Adobe's strategy to develop an "ecosystem" for rich Internet applications (RIAs) that combine online and desktop experiences, are built using its Flex framework, and run using AIR and its Flash player.

Share Service, Business Objects

Buzzword allows people to create word processing documents, enabling users to work with documents that are both local to their machines and shared online.

The chief advantages are that documents can be accessed from anywhere, and permission-setting can help facilitate version control. Office productivity tools with an online component are a hot area these days, with products from Google, IBM, and others. Microsoft this week announced Office Live Workspace, which enables Office users to access and share documents online.

As it maneuvers against the other software giants for this new territory, Adobe is hoping it will be able to duplicate earlier successes. For instance, David Mendels, an Adobe senior vice president, compared the collaboration on and sharing of Buzzword documents to PDFs.

Adobe said it will be adding a new file-sharing service called Share, now in beta, that will make sharing documents easier. Share was also built with Flex, and includes a set of APIs so that developers can create mash-ups with data from different applications, or they can create Flash-based previews.

Adobe said that because business documents can benefit from a dynamic updating of data, the company will jointly develop new technologies with Business Objects. The technologies include ways to integrate RIAs with back-end data and J2EE infrastructure . Using Business Objects' Xcelsius Connector with Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, for instance, users would be able to stream real-time data into animated charts and graphs, financial presentations, or interactive dashboards.

The collaboration with Business Objects, which could result in what Mendels said would be an environment with real-time data as a "part of every document," will also use AIR, Flex, and Flash.

Microsoft's and Adobe's Approaches

All of these announcements can make it easier for developers to use AIR's integrated runtime, said Forrester analyst Oliver Young, and that can only help Adobe in its battle with Microsoft and others for applications that combine desktop and online applications.

Although Adobe and Microsoft are today releasing new components to their multimedia ecosystem, he noted, they are taking different approaches to productivity tools and the Web. "If you talk to Microsoft," he said, "they are viewing the Web as an add-on to productivity tools," while Adobe, IBM, and Google see collaboration as the cornerstone of content creation.

Young said that Microsoft's and Adobe's differing views of how productivity and other tools will work in an Internet-connected desktop environment were both "incomplete," but that eventually they will come together.