Chizen: Spreadsheet, probably not, but the presentation application is intriguing. The trick is to develop one or acquire one where we believe we're differentiated by leveraging the AIR platform. What excited us about Buzzword wasn't being in the word processing business but that it's a great example of what AIR can do. It also fits really nicely into our Acrobat document collaboration strategy.

IDGNS: Do you see Adobe competing against Google's Apps suite of communication and collaboration hosted software and against Microsoft Office?

Chizen: It's more about offering the service to someone who is already collaborating with PDF documents, sharing their documents, or protecting their documents with us online and who wants to be able to edit or create a document. We're not looking to target the serious word-processing Office user, but for those people who are in our ecosystem, involved in a collaborative workflow, we want to make sure we can address their needs.

IDGNS: Why is the AIR approach preferable to building an offline component for browser-based applications along the lines of what Google is doing with Google Gears?

Chizen: For some applications, the browser is great, and having offline capabilities will be a great extension. But for other applications, we want complete control over the user experience [and the browser is inadequate.]

That's where we really differentiate: The ability to go a little further in local capabilities, the ability to drag and drop easily from the desktop to the application and back. Those things would be tough to do with a browser. And some applications, you want to stay in them and don't want to be encumbered by a browser. You want local presence, and that's where we really shine.

IDGNS: What's your latest take on Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in for delivering video and interactive graphics on the Web like Flash?

Chizen: It appears to be trying to imitate the Flash player: It runs in the browser and is designed for interactivity, animation, and video. Fortunately, we've had a 10-year head start, and we have a complete ecosystem around Flash.

We're on 99.1 percent of all computers and on 300 million non-PC devices. More than 70 percent of video is streamed through Flash player. Millions of developers and designers use Adobe tools.

It's going to take Microsoft a long time to catch up, we believe. In the meantime, we continue to advance Flash, and we're working on AIR. I take Microsoft seriously, but we're in pretty good shape.