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.""
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...
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.
Sure IE will come with support for it, and of course that support is not optional, you'll end up downloading and installing it no matter what (as long as you insist on using Windows).
As Office evolves it will be more and more integrated into IE and even though IE is not required by the OS, it will be required by Office. I believe that the recent ruling only concerned their dominance in the OS area, not in productive software (i.e. Office), but I may be wrong about that.
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!
There's a common misperception in regards to what "innovation" means. Most companies that are not making a new and unique product depend largely on taking preexisting concepts and designs and either finding improvements or enhancements to said design, often creating their own proprietary applications.
For example, one could easily accuse Adobe of the exact same theft of concept:
(1)They patented Postscript type as a way to allow desktop publishing to advance to a point where it could compete with conventional printing shops, while similarly giving themselves a near monopoly on the desktop with applications such as Pagemaker. Speaking of which...
Pagemaker was a desktop publishing app that basically put Adobe on the map, despite it's being released at a time when there were multiple companies making various flavors of SOHO publishing solutions. Other than the GUI and certain key tools, it wasn't really that innovative, and Adobe can easily be accused of "ripping off" other software companies.
Also, the same applies to Photoshop. One could easily claim as well that it was almost a direct rip of MacPaint when it first came out. Once again, other than the GUI and key tools, it wasn't that innovative, there were hundreds of paint/edit programs on the market. Similarly, the same applies to Freehand (surprisingly, the sole piece of software that's not innovative at all, and still recieving ample competition from Corel).
Ahhh, and then we move to the PDF format, which ironically was an application meant to provide an alternative to rich text Word documents. Not exactly any innovation there either, in fact, far more bloated and complicated than even Word could ever hope to be.
So Microsoft made their own "PDF Killer"... It isn't like they haven't ripped off other companies before, the implied fear of Adobe somehow losing to Microsoft in a market where they have a considerable share is ridiculous.
Personally, I dislike PDF, especially in terms of bloat and loading delays in browsers. It's ridiculous, to have to wait an extra 5-10 seconds for Acrobat to load (and another 10-15 seconds just to load the document into the browser, just to read a tech sheet. It's gotten increasingly slower as they add idiotic things like update scans that bog the system down with redundant inquiries, and the software steers further away from what it was originally meant to do: Read PDF documents.
Now as for real innovation, don't hold your breath hoping for it. The market currently depends on a very limited range of hardware, and as long as they're locked into established standards, they won't truly become innovative. Add to that the hobbling of VC funded "innovations", which never take off due to the incapacity of CEOs to look at the big picture (as evidenced from IBM's first taste of the microprocessor, without the slightest idea of what to do with it).
At least until they learn to, and this should be the mantra: Invent.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.