Just couple of years ago SaaS (Software as a service) was just merely an idea/lab concept of software giants. But hey that scenario has completely changed and turned into a head to toe race that transforming the basic computing completely virtual. T

Though Adobe is one of the most admirable software giant, but was completely absent from this race, by virtue of its purchase of a start-up firm (Virtual Ubiquity Inc) that’s been developing an online word processor that’s coincidentally built on Adobe technology now adobe joins the race in full gear.

Adobe will announce today its plans to move into online word processing by acquiring Virtual Ubiquity Inc., a closely held firm in Massachusetts that offers a service called Buzzword. Terms of the acquisition were unknown at the time of this writing. Buzzword will work online or offline, in a browser or on a desktop, on Windows, Macintosh or Linux, and provide the exact same experience regardless of platform or connection status. Adobe is promising that Buzzword will be the next generation in online, collaborative document creation and management.

As part of the online publishing push, Adobe is launching a service called Share as well, which will allow people to upload Buzzword documents and let them view and/or edit them. They can also be embedded into a Web page in a similar fashion to how YouTube video can be embedded now.

Buzzword will hardly be the first online word processor nor is Adobe the first company to pledge collaboration on documents. Internet search giant, Google has been trying to popularize Web services that handle key functions of Office over the years and closing in to hammer the final nail to the coffin of desktop office programs. Google’s arch nemesis Microsoft has been talking about doing that with Word for years. One of the promises of AJAX was that it would enable traditional desktop applications to move to the Web, with word processors being one of the more obvious choices.

Finally Microsoft is rolling out a free service that lets users of its Office software create and share documents over the Internet in new ways.

Office Live Workspace, to become available in a test version today, will allow its users to save up to 1,000 Office documents online, needless to mention only suitable for small/medium size business. For larger companies, Microsoft plans to sell Internet-based services, called Microsoft Online, that handle communications functions such as managing email. Those chores, carried out by programs that include Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, have mainly required companies to run software on their own server systems. Question is if that is only best viewed or worked in IE (which usually Microsoft does), than whole effort to move office online, is screwed.

So now let’s seat back and enjoy the game, Google-MS-Adobe the dynamic trio edgy to rule the web :).