Posted by Richard at October 5th, 2007

True Confessions and Full Disclosure: I am a pathetic geek for online office apps.

Theoretically, they fascinated me when I first heard of them, but that was back when pretty much everyone who wasn’t making six figures was stuck with dial-up. I mean, if you were in the office on a high-speed LAN, why would you need online office apps, and how in the world would they ever be viable for anyone else?

The 1998-99 drop in DSL and cable prices changed that. When I got my first freelancer-hiring powers in 2002, all my work-from-home contractors had ready access to broadband-speeds. The problem was they didn’t all have ready access to Word (or know how to use track changes). Some of them just hated Microsoft Office, some of them (admirably) wouldn’t pirate Microsoft Office, and others were using Linux. (And in 2002, if you wanted to make my heart skip a beat, all you had to do was say the word Linux.) When we started having to turn down interesting, capable freelancers because they didn’t have a copy of Word, I started looking for options, and started wishing that we could just go ahead and get online word processing software and fulfill the wild dream of collaborative writing/editing and development.

I was a late but enthusiastic adopter of Google Docs, and I enjoyed playing with Zoho (the international underdog with erratic features but a better interface). However, neither ever matched Word for sheer functionality, so I still had to do final preparations on a document in Word or another program. Additionally, the interfaces (even on Zoho) were a little too minimal and clunky. The online word processors had their strengths, though: Not even Apple’s Pages (which never kicked Word’s ass the way Keynote mopped up on PowerPoint) made cleaner, more usable HTML, which made both programs great places to start anything Web-destined (and GoogleDocs had the Publish-to-Blog feature, which was pretty dreamy). To my thinking, while the other players in the online office apps game went after the the enterprise market, other consumer-oriented online word processors were going to have to simply fight it out for third place against these two early entries.

Then Virtual Ubiquity quietly put Buzzword into beta. I discovered them this week while, still in beta, they cut a deal and were bought by Adobe, who snuck into the online apps marketplace. I got my beta invitation yesterday (apparently they mistook me for someone important) and took some time to play with their features.

My thoughts:

  • The good stuff:
    • The Flash interface is beautiful. It’s the sort of intuitive, usable complex set of menus that Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon should have been (instead of the grotesque, feature-masking mess it turned out to be). The way it works leaves them plenty of room to expand without running into long, bloated menus or other user-unfriendliness.
    • The sharp use of Flash also gives them the ability to embed fonts that may not be on the user computer (or even on the creator’s computer) and to render them consistently across platforms. If you’re a fan of Myriad, this is the online word processor for you.
  • The “areas for improvement”:
    • It’s pretty damned cool that the word processor can embed Adobe’s pet postscript fonts right into my document. It’d be cooler if I could also choose standard universal fonts and see my document the way it’ll look on a user’s computer. You guessed it: as of the beta release, I can’t. Buzzword needs to play nice with TrueType, even if it doesn’t like it very much.
    • It’s a Web-based word processor. It’s a wonderful Web-based word processor. It needs to frigging export to HTML. It doesn’t. Currently, your options are Word/.doc format, .rtf format, and Office’s almost-forgotten 2003 XML format. I mean, who the hell used that?
    • Speaking of which, one of Macromedia’s neatest ideas - one Adobe is still supposedly supporting - was FlashPaper. This provided Web-ready copy in a fast-to-render, easy-to-use (and Google readable) format that was far better for online reading than Adobe’s PDF. Now that Buzzword is an Adobe product, it needs to export it’s documents to FlashPaper (and - whacky as this might sound - PDF), Adobe’s own two formats for delivering documents.
    • The “revert” feature under the version history is poorly labeled. This is an easy fix, and one that should be addressed quickly.
    • And the big one: No style sheets. I know they want to avoid Word’s feature bloat, but style sheets aren’t bloat, they’re essential parts of good document structure and design (and they mean that when you get an HTML export, it will work correctly).

All in all, a nice entry for the Buzzword creators and I’m looking forward to playing more with it as the feature-set develops. If they play their cards right, they could easily knock Zoho down to the “also ran” position and horn in on Google’s share of the market. If you’re thinking about an online app that might do some real damage to the desktop market, this could be it, but it’s got a way to go.

Check out Buzzword to apply for a beta invitation.

Blogged with Flock