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.
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
PDF isn't a very good format either because Adobe controls the spec. It isn't open.
Looking at Microsoft's XDocs FAQ since I can't get to the article, it appears to be geared primarily towards creating forms so it's not obvious how it competes directly. I never liked PDF forms and they seems to be used rarely.
The evilness of XDocs depends on whether you will be able to easily use them without Office. PDF has wide support on many platforms.
-Kevin
But why is Excel the best? Is it because they just made a better product and everybody else gave up because they couldn't innovate? Or is it because Microsoft crushed the opposition by exploiting their monopoly?
I think you'll find that Microsoft ensured that the "best product" never got made, because they knew it wouldn't be theirs.
One. Slashdot is a forum, not a united voice.
Two. XML is good, because it's a format that parsers have been written for, so developers don't have to write yet another file format parser, but merely write some additional logic ontop of an existing XML parser.
Three. Microsoft using XML isn't bad. However, given the history of their actions with regards to standards, and common sense, it is highly probable they'll find some way to subvert XML into some bizarre format that only MS Office can handle. This is what some of us at Slashdot feel will happen. XML isn't bad, but Microsoft doesn't have a track record for following standards. They do however, have the high score for subverting them.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
[..]
Now Microsoft want to use XML too... but that's also bad
It's simple. The people who post to Slashdot generally don't trust Microsoft. And they've good reason not to. Even when they say they are using a particular format, they deliberately do stuff to make it incompatible with anything that isn't from Microsoft.
Try this simple test. Open a document in Microsoft Word 2000. Save as HTML. Look at the HTML. You will find yourself looking at something that is unlike any other HTML you'll ever come across.
So when Microsoft say that XDocs is in XML format, it doesn't really mean it will be in XML format, just something they themselves call XML format.
Microsoft hasn't done anything recently that has convinced me that I can trust what they say. So I don't. The mistrust runs so deep that I, and I expect may other people who post on Slashdot, will be absolutely amazed if we open an XDoc and see something like this:rather than (and this is a small extract from a very simple document in Word 2000 saved as "html"):
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.