Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft takes on PDF
bhhenry writes "Linux Format reports on a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology to be included in Office 11, called XDocs. From the article: "Adobe's stock took an immediate hit, and some analysts went so far as to compare Adobe to erstwhile MS competitor Netscape.""
Let me guess, IE7 will include built in support for them.
PDF is a documented, established format which does the job, has open implementations and is not from Microsoft, the company which even businesses begin to hate due to all the licensing crap as of late.
Surely this sort of thing is exactly what the US DOJ is avidly against - using overwhelming market share (in, say, office products) to gain overwhelming market share in other sectors (wysiwyg "electronic paper"). Hopefully the EU anti-competition measures will be more stringent than those in the US.
XDocs are based around the XML specification. Hence, wouldn't they be easily modifiable?
But I see that this, unlike browsers a few years back, as being pretty damn entrenched in the business and graphics world.
With browsers 6 years ago there was very little loyalty, so MSIE could move in before everyone realized just how powerful MS was going to be over Netscape and the other companies involved in browsers.
But with Adobe Acrobat we're talking about a refined and popular format. Actually, Acrobat is one of the best file ideas out there, IMHO. It is perfectly cross platform, well designed, and (neglecting to note the whole russian programmer fiasco) Adobe has a good business model behind it.
MS's only strong point could be integration, like they offer with all of their other 'solutions', but Adobe already has great integration wih their own suite of programs and even with Microsoft Word.
They should call it Bob...
...surely the issue is not whether or not it's Microsoft, but whether or not the technology actually works.
IMHO, postscript/PDF is one of the most ingenious formats around. It is extremely portable, handles fonts, vector graphics and (perhaps to a lesser extent) bitmaps wonderfully, and, if used sensible, can be extremely compact. And just about every typsetting machine on the planet uses it.
So for Microsoft to win this one, they are going to need to produce a pretty innovative product, for which the precedents are not good...
Virtually serving coffee
aaahhhhh. A non-anti-MS post. RATE IT DOWN IMMEDIATELY!
assholes. keep buryin your head in the sand, it'll make the bad people go away.
It's time that there is a free PDF clone out there. Lets start work. dvi?
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
No doubt. How is MS still this powerful, that the mere breath of possible vaporware is enough to send investors scurrying away from the competition? People have seen through their shenanigans for years, have even demonstrated some of them (though perhaps the least noxious of them) in open court, and yet when they say jump the only thing we can say is how high? It's pathetic.
can anyone remember the last time they actually came up with something innovative ? All they do is examine markets, pick one with only one large competitor and rewrite the software in an inferior way.
Fortunately, there's a big difference with netscape : netscape was a small company, the web was still in its infancy. Adobes pdf market (press) on the other hand is a billion dollar industry and adobe has quite a tad of experience with lawsuits. I doubt they'll just sit and scream murder...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
That says as much about the sad state of the way the stock market works as it does about MS. If people believe that other people believe this will affect Adobe, then they will bail out before those 'other people' do. This of course causes other people to bail out, and the next thing you know, the bottom has dropped out of the stock.
Ray
It will be a PDF Killer when they include it in every single MS product. IIS will have modules to generate and process them on-the-fly, IE7 will have the Viewer, Office will have the Publisher, Exchange will have its own interface, of course, and since they'll certainly be wrapping it in a layer of DRM, the DMCA will prevent anyone from reverse-engineering it to produce a compatible Viewer for NS/Moz/Konq/Opera/Lynx or *insert-your-non-MS-OS-here*.
And since this idea wasn't mentioned at all during the DOJ Antitrust trials, DOJ probably wont bother touching it.
Don't call it sad! Look at it as your own chance to pick up bargain shares!
In effect, Microsoft depends on its users - largely technology ignorant - to push its technologies into areas of resistance regardless of the problems it causes. It is so like the old IBM that one can only assume the managers read IBM internal memos before bedtime. Except that IBM had better R&D, a wider range of products, and a captive market for mainframes...and it still ended up in trouble.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yeah, but acroread or xpdf start up a hell of a lot easier on a P60 box than OO. Now if there were an OO-lite reader/renderer with connectivity to the printer... then it could be interesting. OR better yet a mozilla plug-in or moz based application. Or how 'bout this as an infrastructure:
.doc converter for all the users who don't have their own OO installation. .doc then over ssl send it to the converter box and render the returned sxw? Can sxw be rendered if only part of the xml is there.... could the render be started as soon as first few packets of sxw come back?
1) one box in an office running OO as a
2) if the plug-in/moz app gets a
And this is precisely what I look for when I publish a document for public or customer consumption. I want the final image of the document locked down, unmodifiable, the way I intend it to be. No messing with the formatting, fonts, colours or anything else that I carefully put together to convey my message.
To too many people a document is just text. This is far from the truth. A document is a presentation, and says a lot about the person or organisation that prepared it. From technical notes to marketting, control over document format is a vital part of publishing.
And that is why PDF kicks the arse of other formats when it comes to this type of use.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
XDocs is only Microsoft's front-end application for modifying XML (which the original slashdot post never mentioned). XDoc is positioned as a Word-like way of manipulating XML form data (Screenshot).
If anything, XML will be the PDF-killer. Adobe trapped themselves into a corner when they devoted themselves to a proprietary file format instead of using XML. With everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, no wonder Adobe's stockholders are getting nervous.
Adobe tried to make PDF widely used for that purpose but failed. And that's quite fortunate: PDF's page oriented format isn't all that hot for on-line forms either.
Simpler even, Acrobat is a commercial product but the format, PDF, is an open format. It will never go away because of that and because of the wide range of implementations/tools readilly available.
Its not just the format I hate, but that whole category of use. "Good for what it does, but what it does isn't good"
A document is a presentation
That is the bad viewpoint that I wish PDF didn't promulgate. I know, I know, Adobe is just responding to demands of the market...
so I really have to focus my ire against the unwashed masses who think they're graphics designers and that they actually need fancy layouts. Or at the even greater masses who allow themselves to be swayed by such trivalities.
The kind of publishing that needs formatting, fonts, and color is mainly about deception. With rare exceptions, text is the truth, and the window-dressing tries to hide it. From Madison Avenue advertising shills to corporate Annual Report polishers to the legions of "PowerPoint(tm)
Engineers" infesting government contracting, its all about getting your words to be judged by something other than what they say.
Many authors aren't concious about doing this- they just want to fit in with everyone else- but that doesn't make it any more honest.
(Yes, there are people who prepare truely graphical data, and who need to lay it out precisely. They are in the minority)
(Yes, for content not delivered over computer- flattened wood pulp or something- carefully prepared alignment is an aid to comprehensibility. But there's no reason to carry this forward into the digital era).
In a more ideal future, all presentation issues will be decided on the client side. You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer. It won't happen for a while yet, but I can dream. And the continued use of PDF blocks this dream.
That says as much about the sad state of the way the stock market works as it does about MS.
After the result of the lawsuit came out, MS stock went up, of course. And then, so did the stock of a lot of other tech companies. After all, as my newspaper explains, when the biggest company of them all goes up so much, that means the whole sector must be on a rise!
So, in short, stock market logic:
1. Microsoft abuses their competitors, abusing a monopolistic stranglehold on many other businesses
2. But they avoid bad punishment in the resulting lawsuit, and can basically continue their practices
3. That's good for Microsoft!
4. That must be good for the competition!!
("5. Profit!" occurs only in their dreams).
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
This is exactly how to cause a market collapse. Give nervous investers a reason to sell, then buy up all the depressed stockes for a penny on the dollar. Thats how the International Banks took over the US in 1929, and its how the Rothchilds took over England after Napoleon had lost Waterloo.
Only simple foolish investors like us take the bath. The proper people always make money.
Just an FYI, expect another -25% return on anything you have in the market today. You should be good after that. But, how long will it take to get that 25% back?
The only way this would even begin to work is if MS's implementation is readable by every OS. The generation of the PDF is one thing, but its sucess is because it is easily accessed on every platform. Not only that, but since its become a household standard, free alternatives exist to generate the actual documents.
MS isn't competing with Adobe, they are competing with a standard.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
"XDocs," a code name for the newest member of the Microsoft Office family, streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because XDocs supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, XDocs helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.
Does that sound like a pdf killer to you? Does it even sound like they're after the same market? Sure they're using XML and they're making "documents" - still sounds more like Lotus Notes than Acrobat. But who uses Acrobat/PDF to collect data? Yes, there are forms in PDF, but the implementation is not nearly flexible enough to build a data collection application, nor can you build decent data collection apps around MS Word.
XDocs is designed to work with any customer-defined XML schema. Where's the proprietary nature there? You give it your proprietary schema and then you use it to build forms to collect data into that schema. All Microsoft is doing is implementing a framework to easilly collect and present information. This is exactly what Lotus Notes was doing more than 5 years ago, only with XDocs the collected data is stored using your XML DTD instead of Lotus's proprietary NSF format. I'm sure Microsoft will extend it to the web - just using an XSL transform to change the XDoc into HTML and collect your data that way.
None of this prevents you from using a PDF to archive resulting documents. To be sure, you can probably embed an XDoc form into an XML dataset and view the resulting file with an XDoc viewer - but that's still one more app that everyone needs, and PDF is still the best portable format for archiving all sorts of documents and images. XDoc just collects information. Yes... all very insidious of Microsoft. A PDF killer.. I don't think so. I don't even see it as a PDF competitor.
Not to mention this is a good thing, because with xdocs MS is porting their MS Word.doc format to XML which will greatly increase interoperability on word docs.
Someone you trust is one of us.
That comment (and it's moderation) shows that the stock market is in an even sadder state of affairs - nobody buys stock because they believe in the company that they are buying stocks in. They just buy stock because they think they are going to make money out of somebody elses hard work.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Obviously those stockholders have never heard of Photoshop or Illustrator, software so dominating that MS had to quietly pull their own competing Photodraw off the shelf, just to save face. I'll be glad to pick up those bargain shares.
But that was what the stock market was always for... getting rich. People never bought shares in a company because they liked the company. Maybe because they thought it would perform well, yes, but the only only people who own shares in a company because they like it are possibly the company's owners/workers.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
selectspec wrote:
This conclusion is unfortunately wrong. XML code can be just as proprietary as any binary code, unless the corresponding Schema or DTD is published together with good instructions describing how to use it. Without this, then having XML or having some unstructured binary file does not make a big difference, except for the fact that the XML code is human-readable (readable does not mean understandable).
XML can help the interoperability between products, to some extent. But only if the DTDs are public so that the meaning of the XML code can be decyphered.
Note that there are already a number of MS Word import/export filters that are not too bad, despite the fact that the file format is binary (or RTF) and the specs are not published. I do not think that XML will help them in any way. On the contrary, one could think that this radical change in file format may just be another way to delay the competition.
-Raphaël
"As a businessman, I'll pay just about any price MS wants, because that guarenteed interoperability is of value to me, and I know they won't charge me more than I could afford." ...
... Until they simply decide it's in their (x-y-z) best interest to simply, say, raise the price of their products 100%! And they will always have a good (public) reason. In the back room, they're just interested in flooding the market with their SW and make sure it closes every other company. It's paranoid, I know... but if we're not careful, we'll end up with their knife up our throat, and we'll have nothing "else" to rely on... because we would have let them win, by not insisting on questionning the validity of their concern about SW development. IF we allow those companie$ (and not just M$), they can "buy" their way to monopoly and once established firmly, well... bye bye freedom of choice, see you in the next eon or two!
So comparisons are being made between Adobe and Netscape. Let's compare apples to apples then.
Netscape was a program for working with HTML files. MSIE did the same thing for free. MSIE was NOT trying to introduce a new document standard, it was intended to render the same web pages that Netscape could render (yes, yes, I know they did mean and evil things that made being a webmaster shitty because of having to code for both platforms, but for the most part this is correct.)
Acrobat is a program for working with PDF files. OS X does the same thing for free. You an render a PDF from any application and view it using the "Preview" program.
In the sense of giving away what someone else is selling, Apple is to Adobe as MS was to Netscape. Netscape failed because they couldn't get revenue selling what the other guy was offering for free. But Apple isn't really a threat to Adobe because the Mac is such a small share of the market. Adobe must make the lion's share of their Acrobat Distiller revenues from Windows users.
MS won't be the threat to Adobe that they were to Netscape if their new product doesn't use the PDF format. This is more apples and oranges because PDF is already a very strong standard that will be hard to displace, and MS isn't just offering PDF manipulation software for free.
This is VERY misleading. Office/XDOCs are going to be competition to Browser/HTML-Forms as a UI-of-choice. They are a Micro$oft "standard" for WYSIWIG Forms for data input.
Think VB GUI forms on steroids, or Word Document Templates with LOTS of embedded VB controls - but all declaratively, rather than procedurally specified (i.e. no executable code).
And all WYSIWIG edited with the (extremely quirky and suboptimal, but VERY FAMILIAR TO THE AVERAGE USER) M$ Word Interface.
MS envision Document Interchange- e.g. order forms, PRINCE2 Project Management products etc. using their "look it it must be open, it's got magic XML pixie dust" XDocs format. (Rest assured the only viable implementation will be in MS Office)
Think about the way people work in the paper office world. They pass around lots of part-filled paper documents called "forms". People fill these out, and more people process them. Many companies rely on template Word documents and excel spreadsheets. Currently, they inflict VB Macros on the document to do stuff with the data entered, with XDocs, the Document becomes a "message" that can be passed to humans and threads alike for incremental processing.
XDocs means these forms can be pretty, while being electronically passed around and filled in, and the form entries progammatically sucked out, even if they're stuctured text themselves, with bolding and 20-point cursive fonts and so on.
PEOPLE LIKE PRETTY.
How on earth can this compete with .pdf if it's not a cross-platform standard?!! The WHOLE point to .pdf is that it's universally available. This is just another Windows-only format.
That's kind of lame that a vague announcement of a new Microsoft product (Xdocs) which is only going to work in the new version of office (11) which will only work on Win2K or XP or the next version of Windows suddenly means that PDFs are going to whither away and die.
.doc readers for free in an attempt to turn ubiquitous .docs into .pdf killers. Anyone remember those doc (and .xls too) readers?
Nevermind the widespread usage of pdf files today. Where I work, we use PDF files to store contracts, and we'd just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a huge project to automate the conversion of post script files into PDFs that are now accessable over the web. I can guarantee that there's no way we'd switch from PDF to Xdocs... at least not for another 5 years.
The analysts who made their remarks about Adobe should realize that MS tried this before (sort of) when they started distributing
it boggles the mind why MS wants to the swiss army knife of computing, jack of all trades-but master of none.
It seems like they try to get their hand in every single piece of pie.
I mean, you have OS, Office crap, media crap, hardware (they do actually make decent hardware), ISP, web server, database, app/web development, browser, games, etc etc.
They really do have too much money if they can afford to R&D every possible niche out there...
Instead of bickering about which of these two formats to use, stop and consider that you can write postscript without using any proprietary software. And you can view postscript on pretty much any platform you desire using ghostview.
So throw them *both* out, I say.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
When I want to e-mail an invoice, I can feel comfortable sending it in a PDF file as opposed to, say, an Excell spreadsheet, because I know that whatever platform my customer is running will have one or a hundred PDF readers. Be it his Windows workstation, Linux machine, his iPaq or Palm Pilot, or his Apple G4 - he'll be able to read my invoice.
So if Microsoft's new format is supposed to kill off PDF - wouldn't they have to succumb and create a reader for {gasp!} Linux?
Oh, and every other platform in existance while they're at it ...
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
An XML based document format could be better than PDF. From what I see PDF is not that easy to extract data from with a program.
XML on the other had could be very easy to extract and or write.
IF it is open it could be a good solution all the way around. I am sure good programers on the Open Office project and Mozilla will add support faster than anyone expects.
My question is where is Open Office for the Mac? I want one office suit for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A few things here.
First off, if anyone has any doubts of MS attempts to dominate EVERY aspect of personal computing, here's your proof.
If Adobe and the PDF format disappear then I think it should be pretty clear to all MS's monopolist status.
The fact that Adobe stock tumbles, should tell you something about the monopoly power of MS. If they plan to introduce a competing product, the other company's stock falls...just because MS enters the fray? I guess these observers believe that once MS enters a market, all others are doomed...(again MS = monopolistic competition).
Pathetic. There are few GOOD PC products anymore, just MS products.
K.
> it's been seen as a companion to postscript
Exactly, in fact PDF and Postscript are very similar. When you render text to PS, you can end up with low-level drawing primitives such as lines and curves defining each letter, rather than high-level instructions such as "draw this string at position x,y". Once you've done that, recovering the original text amounts to highly sophisticated shape recognition and is impossible for all practical purposes. Precisely because PS and PDF support so many rendering mechanisms they are unsuitable as editable document formats.
Your PC not having Acrobat reader went on for years?! It's a free download! I have not found PDF to be inconvenient on the PC. Yes, you need the reader app, but otherwise it works pretty well. All you're doing is opening a file after all. OS 9 needed add on software too. Really, it's not PDF that's a pain, it's the PC. ;-P
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Furthermore, When I distribute .pdf files to people around my campus (I'm involved in a couple student groups) I invariably find someone without Acrobat Reader, and I then must explain how to download and install it. And while most people use computers vastly overpowered for their needs, they rarely understand the idea of document files. One guy asked why "Word can't open it." So if Microsoft releases a .pdf killer that comes standard on Windows computer and a free program to make it backwards compatible, I can see Adobe being shoved out of the market in a hurry.
It may not be a popular opinion but it's true. Yeah, I'm not a huge Microsoft fan either, and this will be abusing their monopoly power, but it will also make life easier for many people. I don't include myself in that group of people since I primarily use Lotus WordPro and PageMaker.
I saw XDocs for the first time 3 months ago in Alpha. It's a generalized form-filling and routing app with a pretty pure XML back end. It's not obvious to me why it should replace either ordinary Web apps or VB apps, but then I'm not a MSFT product manager.
/. is suposed to be technically competent.
PDF?!?!? get real. PDF stands for "Print the Damn File", it's reasonably-portable electronic paper. Adobe in their dreams would like to turn it into a forms package but they've never got close to first base.
A bit of basic fact-checking in future,
I think this is just a bit of an over reaction. MS is a little late in this area. PDF is very well established as a standard. Adobe and the rest of the world are much more cognizant of how MS handles competition. They will b much more prepared then netscape was. Finally, they also have the US legal system to deal with. PDF is the legal standard for e-filing of cases and motions. The entire US legal system from parking tickets to antitrust filings, if filied electronicaly is filied using PDF,TIFF and a touch of XML. I develop products in this area, and it is hard enough to get these folks online, much less change their minds to use yet another standard. Last week I had a discussion with various courts about how to get just this kind of stuff onto microfilm. The courts won't move, and the businesses will stay close to what the courts use for official documents. I really don't think PDF is going anywhere. Through in XML-FO and FOP and things get even more firm.
-jj-
I would like to think the actual logic went something like:
1) Microsoft offers products people like to use/buy in the market, causing some businesses pain, and others to flourish. Mostly, it promotes the diffusion of information technology throughout the American and world economy.
2) The government inserts its coercive nose into this situation, seemingly helping some of Microsoft's direct competitors, but in reality raising the specter of intrusive meddling in the computer business, and the accompanying distortions and uncertainty. And, by the way, those competitors do little (if any) innovating of their own during the long period in which Microsoft is on trial.
3) After a settlement is reached, the market breathes a general sigh of relief in the (probably vain) hope that this will mean the end of these shenanigans. Maybe now everyone will get back to business.
But, the parent is probably right that this is just the usual short-term market madness. I predict Sun et. al. will continue their gradual decline as long as their primary corporate vision seems to be "whine about Microsoft".
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
That being said, the stock market is designed to be unstable and fluctuate. Why it doesn't fluctuate even more is beyond my understanding, but there must be some factors that stabilize it as well (they are called long-term investors, I guess).
I would guess the hit ADBE took today is more related to the downgrade from Deutsche Securities than anything MSFT did.
Mind you, if it's not free and open, nobody will use it.
Yeah, 'cause no one ever uses things like the increasingly obfuscated MSWord formats. 'Cause they're not free and open. I can't remember the last time some idiot sent me a proprietary Word-format document. Nope. Never happens.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The important lesson that seems to have been missed is... learn enough about the underlying technology to understand whether or not the business model makes sense or not through one's personal analysis, don't make an investment decision based on what the "pundits" say.
So the entire printing industry is going to change over from supporting PDF as an input format that supports everything up to and including embedded job ticket and billing information because Microsoft said "Boo!"
All of us are immediately going to go out and deinstall Acrobat Reader or whatever we're using to read PDFs and buy Office 11 (changing to XP to do it) because all the terabytes of PDF only content are going to magically morph into XDocs.
Yeah, right.
Even if the format is in fact superior, PDF is so much a part of Internet and print and other technologies that it would be years before XDoc content became noticeable enough to make it worth the trouble for end users to download and install a reader.
A company who makes its docs available in XDoc format only means that only Office 11 users will be able to read it. All that company will get as a result will be trouble from angry users. People aren't going to upgrade to Office 11 just to read some company's docs.
However, it does present an investment opportunity for making money off the stupid who are unloading Adobe because they actually believe this bullshit, just like the pre-announcement of the MS antitrust decision did... people snapped up $93 million in MS stock in response to that pre-announcement, including the slashdot readers who got to the pre-announcement from here.
I was wondering who the "pundits" cited in this article were. That's a word that only marketdroids and a few hack journalists that know no better use. The original of this article which was posted without attribution at Linux format can be found here.
Well, the "pundits" exist, a search on XDocs at google reveals this.
Here's a somewhat better article hereWell, the same investor analysts whose stock hyping and premature panic that drove the rise and fall of the bubble are in hype mode now. Apparently, since their understanding isn't past the buzzword level, they just don't get how embedded PDF technology is in American business and particuarly industrial segments like printing.
With the right apps, I can send a PDF file to a printer that can be turned into a gigantic print run without human intervention. If XDocs is all that Microsoft hopes for and enjoys the results that Microsoft wants and comes out on time, I might be able to do the same with XDocs by 2010 or so.
Remember this next time you're tempted to make an investment decision based on what a "pundit" says. Then check the facts yourself, you might make a lot more money by doing the opposite.
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