Adobe Acrobat and its PDF documents have been around for a long time. It's a great product and comes in handy when you want to send documents that look clean and have read-only privileges. In their latest version, Acrobat 9, Adobe has built in technology so that one can embed Flash content into PDF documents, making the Flash content portable through a document rather than a large Flash file. Pretty interesting for marketers and those working in the creative design space.
Another interesting move is that Adobe is releasing a document management and document storage application similar to Google Docs, Microsoft Sharepoint, and WebEx Workspace. They include a mini suite of capabilities: Buzzword for word processing and text editing; Share for document sharing; My Files for document storage, Create PDF for document conversion, and ConnectNow for web conferencing. You can find beta versions of the document management solution at www.acrobat.com
The last move is that Adobe is offering a free web conferencing solutions for up to three people and an online document repository where users can convert up to five documents into PDF. I suppose if Adobe can't SELL their web conferencing solutions, they might as well give it away for free. Can't really blame them as most of their revenue comes from Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat anyway.
Adobe Version 9 is available in Standard ($299), Pro ($449) and Pro Extended ($699).
If you are interesting in reading more about Adobe's corporate vision and market analysis, click this link: Download adobe_may_2008.pdf
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