Adobe to move into office?

Today has seen the strongest indication that Adobe may be preparing to move into the office productivity market after a senior manager refused to rule out the possibility.

Any move into the market, which is currently dominated both at home and in offices by Microsoft’s Office suite, would be met with fierce competition not just from Microsoft, but also Apple, Google and IBM who also are involved in the sector.

The speculation came after Adobe’s group manager for platform evangelism, Mike Downey said: "We have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office-productivity software market."

"Considering we have built this platform [Adobe Integrated Runtime] that makes it easy to build rich applications that run on both the desktop and the browser, I certainly wouldn’t rule anything like that out."

"We want to build a platform that lets any corporation build applications in the browser and on the desktop," says Downey. "And just like any of our customers, Adobe is planning to take this platform and use it to build applications as well."

The software developer currently dominates audio-visual production with Premiere and Photoshop applications. It has also had huge success with its Flash and Acrobat products.