Adobe (ADBE) has aquired Web-based office software company Virtual Ubiquity.

Virtual Ubiquity, based out Waltham, MA, the company behind Buzzword, and online word-processing collaboration tool. This acquisition throws Adobe in the same arena as Google and Microsoft, who have in recent years unrolled their own online office-like collaboration tools.

The news broke yesterday by Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb, who had this positive feedback regarding Buzzword:

...after playing around with Buzzword for the past couple of days, I'm nearly ready to trade in Microsoft Word -- nearly. I've been long hesitant to trade in my faithful Microsoft Office suite for Zoho, ThinkFree, or Google offerings, but Buzzword addresses a number of my niggling concerns and even manages to do some things far better than Microsoft does.

What makes Buzzword different? It's the first online word processors written entirely in Adobe Flash, meaning that Buzzword can take advantage of the rich application tools and technologies that Flash offers. This always means that broad user-adoption is more likely, as the web-based application will more closely resemble the off-line products that consumers are more accustomed to using.

Josh always raises the question: is Adobe planning a larger push into the Web office space? My guess: Most definitely.

The real question is how will they monetize their new services? Will they bundle it with the rest of their Creative Suite? Will they offer it a free Web-based Ad-supported service?

At the time of this writing, Adobe's stock seems unmoved by this news which could potentially change the direction this company goes in the future in a big way.

Adobe's press release available here.