Today Adobe launched its online office product, Acrobat.com. When I visited, it looked like this:
Not inspiring, but also not a surprising glitch for the morning of Day 1.
Turns out the problem was the Flash blocker in IE7Pro. Even if I clicked the link to enable Flash, the screen remained invisible. I had to completely disable Flash blocking on the site for it to work properly. With that done, I tried to sign up for an account. But it turned out I already had an account? Really? OK, e-mail me a link to reset the password. Done. Now install an ActiveX control. Done. Finally, I am able to try to use the new Buzzword document creation/editing service.
it looked like this:
Wake me up when it’s out of beta.
Update: Five minutes later, it’s working. Slick looking, but I ran into several problems in my very first document. More details later.
Another update: Several more server disconnects while in the middle of editing documents. Based on this experience, Acrobat.com is definitely not ready for an open public beta.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
What are the odds you’ll even bother going back in the near future? I find that when I visit a new site and it doesn’t work as advertised, I don’t even remember about it in a few days.
Ed, I took a quick look at Adobe ConnectNow this morning and had a quite different experience. (I rarely use IE anymore, so I don’t run any type of Flash blocker.) I was able to signup, grab the ActiveX control, and verify my email address (apparently, I didn’t have an account already). I created a quick document and exported it to PDF. Looks okay. The drawing tool was interesting too–pointing arrows any which way to highlight something is fun. I didn’t try any of the collaboration facilities yet, which could be useful, but for me, the major downside is no spreadsheet or presentation facility.
The real question is, do we really need another option to create documents? Most businesses have Office and Sharepoint for collaborating on documents, plus Google Applications and OpenOffice are waiting in the wings to attempt to carve out their own portion of this problem. That said, Adobe says this is going to be the foundation of many faciliities moving forward, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I had a much more positive experience with their launch than http://www.plurk.com this morning.
I am still trying to figure out how you can get the error message from Adobe without a working internet connection. Some really bright programmers there 😉