Acrobat was nimble, Acrobat was quick

Looks like it’s action stations over at Adobe — my good mate Don from PDFzone reports that sources tell him that the new Acrobat.com may enable document sharing direct from their own servers.

As Don says, it might be of interest to small business, but for large business — there’s always an element of distrust or at the very least anxiety about handing over the crown jewels for someone else to mind. With Adobe throwing out another bucket load of product names — Don talks about the next-gen Macromedia Breeze aka “Acrobat ConnectNow” riding on the coat-tails of an alleged Acrobat 9 release.

Whilst it’s always exciting to check out the next version of Acrobat – I am a little confused as to what “conducting real-time meetings on your desktop” has got to do with a PDF file. For the most part, it seems to me that Adobe is trying to leverage the Acrobat name in order to attract attention to its new product-line.

Is Acrobat quite so nimble? I’m not so sure anymore – what once used to be lightweight, easy and fast to distribute – and understand, is now becoming a monolith, trying to be all things to all people – perhaps approaching (in complexity) some of the Microsoft products that it lives alongside.