Adobe Buzzword

» see buzzword.acrobat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i remember buzzword as one of the more interesting flash-era demos i tried and then never went back to. it was 2008. i was at university in ankara, on ttnet broadband, and online word processors were the new shiny thing that the tech press would not shut up about. google docs (still half-merged with writely) was the obvious choice. buzzword was the more elegant alternative i opened once because everyone was saying it looked better than google docs, which was technically true.

the actual experience was: install adobe flash player if you somehow did not have it. wait for the swf to load. then type into a word processor that rendered fonts correctly and laid pages out the way they would print. it was visibly better-looking than google docs in 2008. it was also visibly slower. closing the tab also lost your session unless you had clicked through the right adobe-id login flow. the second time i opened a flash word processor to write something, the file did not autosave the way docs did. i was back on google docs by the end of the week.

buzzword came out of virtual ubiquity, a boston startup founded by rick treitman, a former lotus word-processing product manager. the company built buzzword on top of adobe flex. adobe had already invested in the startup as part of an effort to seed apps built on adobe integrated runtime (the air name became more prominent later). the formal acquisition was announced on 30 september 2007. the terms were not disclosed. buzzword went live under the adobe brand soon after and became the headline app inside acrobat.com workspaces, sitting next to an online presentation tool and a basic table editor.

the slow death started early. flash player itself was already losing ground on mobile after the 2010 apple decision to not support it on iphone, which made the entire premise of a flash-rendered word processor a problem nobody wanted to defend. adobe announced in january 2014 that workspaces on acrobat.com would shut down. the final retirement landed on 6 january 2015. the document export tools stayed online for a few more weeks to let users pull their files out.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

buzzword was an attempt to use flash as a serious application runtime, not as a video player. the wysiwyg page rendering inside the swf used real typography and proper page-margin controls. for 2007 it looked closer to indesign than google docs did. the collaborative features let multiple people edit and comment on a document with permissions set by the document creator. that was meaningful before google docs had finished its real-time-edit story.

the cost of all that visual quality was a heavy install of the flash player runtime plus a slow page load on every open. by 2010 the answer to "do you want to install flash player to write a memo?" was no for most users. by 2012 the answer was no for everyone except flex developers and a few enterprise document workflows that adobe sales had locked in years earlier.

~ how it ended ~

adobe announced the end of workspaces in january 2014, with a one-year window for users to export their documents. buzzword stopped accepting new edits on 6 january 2015. the export endpoints stayed live a little longer to handle the last wave of pulls. adobe formally exited the document-authoring business for word processing and spreadsheets at the same time, leaving acrobat itself focused on pdf reading and signing.

~ the legacy ~

buzzword sits next to flash builder and flex inside the larger adobe-killed-its-flash-stack story. the parent runtime got an end-of-life date of 31 december 2020 and the entire ecosystem of flash-only apps disappeared with it. buzzword was retired five years before the runtime itself, which means it died on commercial logic rather than on platform logic. google docs had won the online word processor market by 2012 and adobe had no business reason to keep paying for a runner-up.

the lesson the writeup decks pulled out of buzzword was simpler than the technical one: a better-looking word processor is not a better word processor if it loses your draft. autosave-in-the-cloud was the actual product. flash typography was the demo.

i wrote my first letter of intent in 2008 in google docs from a campus computer, with a track-changes review by a professor who had only ever used word. it would have looked better in buzzword. it would have also not been there the next morning.

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