Got some spare time you don't minding wasting? Great, you'll need it if you want to check out Adobe's www.acrobat.com software. Touted as Adobes attempt to take on Google and Microsoft. Trying out Buzzword, acrobat.com's competitive web app to Google Docs, took a painful 9 minutes and 45 seconds just to download and get to the first usable screen. Compare that to Google docs which loads virtually instantaneously, compared to acrobat.com.
Now I'd like to blame that slow load time on acrobat.com servers that might be overloaded given this is a new product. Possible, but I doubt there are tens of thousands of people trying to run acrobat.com apps in their browser at 4am eastern time in the morning. It is beta software but that initial experience of watching acrobat.com display thermometer bar one right after another, downloading frameworks, styles, fonts, and who knows what else, tells me acrobat.com is no web 2.0 app contender yet.
Adobe's still thinking monolithic software, just running in your browser is what's different. I have to say that at this point I'm not all that impressed. Adobe has a ways to go in my opinion. Google Docs doesn't have much to worry about either.
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Mitchell Ashley is CEO and Chief Strategist of Converging Network, LLC, providing product and technology strategies to emerging technology companies. A serial entrepreneur, Mitchell has created many successful products and services in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular Still Crazy After All These Years podcast.
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Acrobat.com performance
Mitchell -
Thanks for checking out our new Acrobat.com release. I'm sorry to hear you had performance challenges - these are rare for us, and could have been the result some scheduled early-morning hour maintenance conducted in the wake of a very busy opening day yesterday.
Normally, Buzzword loads within a few seconds - true, it might not load as fast as Google Docs, but the extra few seconds resolves to a much richer user experience and page fidelity that, according to countless feedback messages we've received, is superior to any other web-based document authoring environment.
I hope you'll continue to give Buzzword and all of Acrobat.com a try. The performance is generally good, in spite of the bump you experienced, and the user experience will win you over.
Tad