Adobe Joins the Productivity Suite/Document Sharing Fray

Image via CrunchBase

Blogger: Guy Creese

This week Adobe Systems announced that Acrobat.com was coming off of beta and that it would offer two subscription types:

• Premium Basic: $14.99 per month or $149 per year, allowing web conferences for up to five people and the conversion of 10 documents/month to PDF.
• Premium Plus: $39.00 per month or $399 per year, allowing web conferences for up to 20 people and the conversion of an unlimited number of documents to PDF.

Adobe is also offering previews of two document processing applications--a spreadsheet application (Tables) and a presentation application (Presentations)--that will ultimately join the Buzzword word processor.

Coverage of the announcement includes:

• InformationWeek, "Adobe Launches Acrobat.com Out Of Beta"
• PC World, "Adobe's Acrobat.com Collaboration Services Emerge from Beta"
  
• The Wall Street Journal, "Adobe to Charge for Acrobat.com"

Adobe thus joins vendors such as Google, Microsoft, ThinkFree, and Zoho that currently offer (or have publicly stated that they will offer) online productivity suites allied with document sharing.

The "heating up" of this space is why I'm currently at work on a Burton Group Market InSight (i.e., quadrant report) on productivity applications. At this point, it's difficult to understand the players without a scorecard--so I'm building the scorecard.