Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Introduce PDF competitor 'Metro'
RustNeverSleeps writes "Computerworld reports that Microsoft will be including a new document format called 'Metro' with Longhorn. Apparently, Metro is intended to be a competitor to Adobe's PDF and Postscript formats. The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing." Reader gsfprez is less optimistic: "... I noticed the main, and probably most important difference between old and busted PDF and new-hotness Metro (besides the Queer Eye styled name)... 'We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.' Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."
I think they are a bit late in the game, given that most people are used to PDF and have PDF reader installed already. It's like Firefox, sure it made IE dropped below 90%, that's still a tiny splash and I don't think it will have the chance to become the majority.
The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right?
No. Royalty-free licensing still allows them to place restrictions. And as for XML, so what? Word documents are in XML format, but the XML only encapsulates a bunch of stuff that's still proprietary and inaccesible. Lastly, the last thing anyone needs is another document format owned by a monopoly.
Adobe fears MS?
They spend nearly $4Billion to buy Macromedia, and MS comes out with the half-crap document format??
Honestly now, someone go slap some sense into Adobe, MS will never be able to make even a dent in Adobe's market share.
There's nothing wrong with PDFs. I can create and open PDFs easily and speedily in OS X with Preview.
Acrobat Reader, however, is like an eighty year old woman behind the wheel of an otherwise useful and speedy automobile. Why does Preview take a a matter of milliseconds to do what takes Acrobat fifteen seconds or more?
Oh yeah, there's no dobut that Metro is going to be Trusted Computing Friendly.
An XML-based PDF-alternative is a good idea. However, a format is not "open" if it is "available for licensing". "Available for licensing" implies that the creator of the format retains some control, and that is not acceptable, no matter who the company is that created the format.
Microsoft seems to have trouble with the concept of "open"; perhaps that's not too surprising, since Sun, traditionally one of the strongest proponents of open systems and formats, has developed trouble in their understanding of "open" as well since they came out with Java.
It doesn't matter if we from the outside can see the complete nuttiness of switching a pdf-based workflow to a MS-the-root-of-all-evil-based workflow. This will succeed, just as Word has succeeded to be the de-facto document standard in every organisation and corporation out there, it's from the same guys who does the rest of the complex shit inside my harddrive. I hear management people saying 'synergetic effects' and we all know what happens when they use that language. Common sense is out the door and stupidity is governor.
Wait...
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
And just recently, when Adobe aquired Macromedia, slashdotters everywhere had to ask: why?
One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other), will now be directly threatened by M$, and so it must do its best and diversify.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
how many Windows based companies end up being a competitor to MS. Then the same company stays and competes in MS's backyard, with their billions of dollars that they can afford to lose, and thinks that they can win! Such companies as Intuit (who has only one product that is profitable; turbo tax), Adobe (who will come under extreme pressures from MS as MS includes more of their new stuff in Windows for free), Oracle/SAP (who will soon be competing against a reved up MS with all sorts of Business software available for free).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
am I wrong in thinking that "Royalty Free" doesn't mean you don't have to pay, just that you don't have to pay per copy - what if it's say $100k to play? then FOSS is SOL
Seriously Microsoft, with your thousands upon thousands of talented (paid) programmers and with the deadline of Longhorn constantly being pushed back, is it at all possible for you to do something that is not
a) Reinventing the wheel
b) Taking someone else's idea and repackaging it
c) 100 steps behind what open source is already doing.
d) Inconsequencal to your only major release, Longhorn.
So what if Longhorn introduces a new document format? Within 5 minutes of running it I bet we'll all find something MS could of spent better their time on.
..it could be cut with a knife. Here is Microsoft, long time producer of completely closed formats to quelch all possible competition (.doc, anyone?), who are clearly hypocritical. MS is simply riding off the back of other OSS formats, and attempting to reap the reward now they have seen that said formats have done well for others. If open source formats are so good, why don't they open .doc? Because it's so entrenched, and it's pretty well the only thing standing between Office and FREE alternatives. I understand that Microsoft is a company, but they are not helping in the development of the Internet.
I don't know if this will catch on or not, and I don't really care.
What bugs me about this is that MS is the largest software company in the world, with a huge research budget, and one of their best ideas is to come up with an alternative to existing de jure standard. Is this really the best use of R & D resources?
Come on people, there are real and interesting problems to be solved in software development and usability...use your powers for good.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
As an end user, I look forward to any replacement to PDFs.
No, you look forward to a replacement for Adobe's PDF Reader. PDF the format is wonderful -- just look at it's support on Mac OS X.
The reason government agencies (and many many others) use it is because it's the best, most open, best-supported format of it's kind. There is absolutely no requirement that you use Adobe's software to read or write PDF.
try not using the fucking bloated reader you moron. BTW.. some people like having documents in a none editable, "what you see on one platform is what you see on all platforms" document.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
You know, sucky products I could deal with. It's their business practices I can't stand.
If they weren't so underhanded and evil we wouldn't have to deal with their sucky products, because market forces would have either killed them or forced them to not suck.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, mostly it's designed to spreat FUD. The aim is to stop people from investing in Adobe. Why would you do that if Microsoft may come along in some years and do a Netscape on them. They will weaken them with insinuation etc. etc. As long as they are able to get away with transferring their monopoly in one product (the O/S) into illegal monopolies in others with no reaction from competition authorities, this will be an effective strategy against anything except for free software.
It is a good idea to be wary of licenses that are royalty free. Every document that has a license, free or not, allows Microsoft, or any company that owns that license to have a foothold in your life.
You don't have to pay for MetroReader version 1 or 2, but MetroReader version 3 might not be free, and they also might change the format slightly, and suddenly you're a Word '97 user in a Word 2000 world.
And then guess what? You have to wait for OpenMetro to reverse engineer the format so you can read Metro documents without MetroReader, because Microsoft decided not to freely license the format to Sun Microsystems.
PDF is here, it's open, it works well, it's already integrated into many businesses, and regardless of how much you hate Adobe Reader, the format itself is good. There's no reason to switch.
The splash screen to Win2K is a bitmap obviously blown up by 200% or so.
Slow down, turbo.
The splash screen is displayed before the video driver is loaded, hense the lack of color depth and resolution.
If you're gunna flame, check your facts first.
A speech...
So tell me how this is going to work in a Studio-print environment.
You've got all of these Mac operators, busily using Adobe Indesign and sending print ads out to magazines and newspapers in the required eps or hi-res PDF format (that MUST be generated by original Adobe products for QA purposes). Then along comes Metro and this somehow competes with Adobe.
How? Adobe make no money from Adobe reader and for the creation of PDF's for the non-publishing industry there have been numerous free (gratis) and/or alternative tools for years. Is Microsoft going to create a killer design tool as well? And for the Mac to boot, coz those graphic artists aint going to swap.
No. What will happen is this becomes just another Microsoft feature that no other platform/tool will be able to support and we will have yet another reader that we have to load up...
Decent printers support postscript, which is well supported in the various opensource OS's,
If M$ can take PS out of printers, or make PS printers, more of a niche item, then they can attack Linux,etc,buy
making it prohibitive to print, right now they own the cheap consumer marker, but imagine if there were no
PS printers -- PDF isnt the big deal, its the part about replacing PostScript, with something they own, and won't, won't, be
giving it away to the opensource world via GhostScript.
Firstly, Microsoft was dealing with a universal format - HTML. Sure, they may have buggered it up or extended it, but BOTH Netscape and Microsoft needed to deal with that format. In this case, Microsoft is trying to introduce a new format that noone has adopted yet. I don't think it's going to fly - people have too much invested in Adobe's PDF and PS formats.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They were the hero for a while, until all that magically disappeared when MSN Messenger got enough market share.
build it right deep into the os and ms is settled
Or is this? I just start to wonder how paid Microsoft PR people are here on Slashdot with the aim to push such articles trough? Because OS X is out? Because Apple is gaining ground?
:)
I just wonder
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Maybe their impossibility to play well with other formats is thier reason to reinvent the wheel.
I hope they have at least learned Word's bloated HTML lesson and do not repeat it...
My other post is a First.
PDF sucks. Hardcore dude. The files are too large, it isn't quite as portable as Adobe wants you to believe, and the inclusion of JavaScript may ran as the number 1 stupid thing ever done to a file format. I mean, what the fuck?
But - it's (mostly) a PostScript subset, it's good at random access, it's a vector format that allows me to copy and paste text from the document, and it is at least more portable than everything but a pure image format. It's an open format, no weird licencing issues, and Adobe has some vested interest in making it work everywhere (like Sun and Java).
If MS can retain the pros of PDF and eliminate even one of the cons, I'd be there with open arms. But they have a culture and history of lock in, and "royalty free licencing" is not the same as "open".
PDF blows. Looks like Metro blows harder.
I expect that an alpha version of "Shorthorn" will get pushed out the door in December just to justify claims that it was ready in 2006. The only way for MS to gain marketshare over PDF would be to leverage their desktop monopoly to break into that new market currently occupied by PDF.
Even if the licensing were just a rubberstamp issue (which it probably isn't) with MS giving the nod till all who request it (which it probably won't), dealing with the paperwork is an unreasonable hurdle and PDF still wins. Publishing is about reaching your audience and that's where a freely available, documented format like PDF comes in. Yes, it's owned by Adobe, but anyone can implement a writer or a reader. Metro fails on that due to licensing restrictions.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
OT -
Actually, I would take the "one project boss" if I got to choose. He only fails one project. The other projects can be delegated to someone else by management.
The million project guy on the other hand obfuscates the resources really needed, which is bad for management because they then start other projects. I bet he also hands out tasks to subordinates and won't listen when they say it is impossible to do with the time allocated, so he makes employees life hell too. So he fails a million projects where some of them might have been saved.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Well, we've always been able to print to postscript, in most operating systems; this is just an evolution.
A few years ago, when Adobe canned Premier for the Mac on OSX because Adobe was all in a huff about Apple competing with them with Final Cut Pro, was the time when Adobe started developing primarily for Windows. Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 were superb on my WinXP laptop at work, but they sucked big, hairy, sweaty, donkey balls on OSX, being slow, not fitting in with the OS HI guides very well and above all, being drastically late to the platform.
At the time (Mac OSX 10.1) one could have had the distinct impression that Adobe had given up on the Mac platform and was only developing for those die hards in the pre-press and printing industry. And since then, Adobe has brought out new tools, such as that Audio app (ex Cool Edit Pro) which are Windows only. Even Acrobat, that bloated piece of pig fat, ran better on Windows.
Then, it seemed as if Adobe realised that OSX was surprisingly (to them and their utterly clueless marketing staff) making big gains rapidly, and lo and behold, The CS set is much better in its OSX integration.
But what makes me really laugh is that Adobe is suddenly being faced with a major competitor to one of its main cash cows (PDF is used in governments and official papers worldwide), and this by no less than Microsoft which has both the resources and the time to slowly bring printer makers to write drivers for it and to let it slowly gain acceptance. Microsoft is about the only company that can afford to let this Metro thing flop through three versions until it gains traction.
I bet you the people in Mountain View (Adobe), are crapping themselves. This could be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia, in order to have Flash as a barganing chip with MS.
OASIS and PDF don't really fill the same niche. Just like how Word's .doc format doesn't fill the same niche as pdf.
Why not fork?
MS never supported PDF because they wanted to lock everyone into using Word and its format(s) as the way to pass documents around. Never mind that it was a load of crap for such purposes, quality has never figured in MS's designs and probably never will.
So, now that MS has admitted that the world not only wants, but is using someone else's format (a nice, open format) are they going to get with the mainstream and give their customers what they clearly want? Fuck no. Microsoft didn't get where it is today by listening to customers: customers are there to milk via lock-in. Does the farmer ask the cows when they'd like slaughtered?
Instead they've decided, as usual, to tell the customers what they want: a new, propriety document format to solve all the problems they're currently solving with PDF.
In other words, just like Sparkle, Microsoft's response to the market is to pick another battle it can't win. To win, it would have to be addressing some lack in the current offering that has the potential to create a new market they can exploit, but the only lack is one MS sees: revenue from making portable documents. The rest of the world is already making them and has little interest in the "problem". So, basically, the market for Microsoft's new format is...Microsoft itself. So, who cares?
It's good to see Bill lose one occasionally.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
OK...for you kiddies out there; Way back in the 90s, Adobe charged an arm and a leg for Postscript ($1,000/printer) and Postscript fonts were expensive. Apple complained. Microsoft complained. Everyone buying a printer complained or wished for a cheap Postscript printer so !!#@$!$ would look right when they printed. Adobe held firm.
Apple decided along with Microsoft to change part of the problem...Postscript fonts. Jointly, they developed TrueType. Adobe held firm...till it was obvious that Postscript was in danger. Rates fell on Poscript licences, though it was too late and TrueType fonts became dominate.
Adobe retrenched and created the Postscript offshoot PDF...and documents became printable and portable again. Adobe became more involved in the detailed document creation process.
Fast forward to now. Microsoft (by themselves) are attempting to complete the job and take Adobe out of the document creation picture. It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time. Expect a suite of Metro document editing and processing tools from Microsoft around the time Longhorn is released.
The only gift in this? You now have a year and a half to two years to plan.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The question is will it be available for Linux like Acrobat is?
in this post, expect constant PR salvos from MS in the next two to three weeks, they'll do all kinds of crazy shit to stay in the news and to steal attention from the launch of Tiger-- this week, in the run-up to release day, and for the next week or two after, as people get their feet wet and those not privy to advance copies start posting reviews.
The blah.jpg.bat was a result of Microsoft assuming users didn't need to see file extensions that it knows what to do with, and hide it from the user. By hiding the file extention, the file actually looks like blah.jpg. which looks like an image to just about anyone. Hiding file extensions is my #1 pet peeve about windows.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Repeat after me: PDF is an output format.
The big strength of PDF (from where I sit) is that it produces a document which can be cleanly and easily *printed*, with consistant results, on most any platform.
For something meant to be viewed on-screen, it's really no better for the end-user than HTML, but still infinitely better than Word (Why doesn't this look right? Don't have the same version of Word? The right fonts installed? etc...)
Of course, 90% of Word docs passed around here at my workplace wouldn't lose anything if they were just plaintext - but the suits don't want to hear that...they want to compose their email in $^@% Word...
Yes, MS is a monopolist and the DOJ "settlement" makes a sick farce of the whole idea of "justice". No arguments there.
But the fact that you're forced to deal with their "sucky" products is that for most people they don't count as "sucky" at all. Or didn't count as "sucky" back when it mattered.
Or let me explain, via a long metaphor: something I keep hearing is some variant of "if number of users meant quality, MacDonald would be the best restaurant." Guess what? For a lot of people it is.
Being "the best" isn't a question of only technical implementation merits for an OS, nor of only cuisine for a restaurant. For the restaurant merits also include stuff like:
- price: there's a lot to be said about paying a couple of euro for a burger, instead of 10 times as much for 5-star cuisine.
- speed of service: maybe I don't have the whole bloody evening to wait while someone cooks an elaborate meal for me. I just want to pick a burger and walk away ASAP.
- availability. If I have to drive through half the city to get a 5-star meal, while a MacDonald's is just around the corner, trust me, I'll get a Mac every time.
Etc. There are about a dozen criteria which get to be a part of the final decision, not just one. And insisting that _one_ aspect is the best, is maybe good for flame-wars, but a piss-poor way to evaluate a RL product or service.
As I've said before, RL decisions are more complex than "MS is evil" or "MS sucks". RL decisions are _never_ perfect. They're the "best" _compromise_, among a bunch of crappy compromises. You don't just have one criterion and take the clear best fit there, you try to end up with the compromise which doesn't suck too much in any of the many real life criteria.
So let's judge MS in that aspect.
Nowadays, MS Windows is "the best" not by means of its technical merits, but by means of having almost all the apps. MS Office isn't "the best" by means of it's technical merits, but because the format is available and accepted virtually everywhere.
Like it or not, that's the market reality: between choosing a rock-solid Linux that runs about 1 in 10 apps I want, and a crappy Windows which runs them all, Windows wins every time. In a sense, it _is_ the "best" OS.
But let's think about how we got here. Think back in the day when the OS market really was still up for grabs and Linux didn't even exist.
Who was going to win? A fragmented and self-incompatible Unix world, which charged more for a license than a whole PC cost? Maybe OS/2 which (A) saw no advertising from IBM, (B) wasn't even pre-installed on IBM computers, and (C) still let an application lock up the whole system, and (D) didn't even try getting developpers and apps?
Let me tell you, I was a flaming OS/2 fanboy at the time. But even _I_, when I look back at the train-wreck-in-slow-motion that OS/2 was, I can only think: "OMG! Was I _that_ retarded back then?" Looking back in retrospect, OS/2 positively sucked compared to Windows. Maybe not on technical merits, but when you consider all factors, it sucked.
So you can probably see how MS won very easily.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
With the exception of beta, when was windows ever free? Who knows --- they might just surprise us and change.
If they model this like Adobe (free readers, but pay-writers) then it would be ok. If they did free readers for everyone, free writers for consumers but pay writers for corporate now that would be awesome.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
From the tone of your voice, I suspect you meant to use the word "insignificant" where you used "signification".
In my experience, compressing XML does have a significant effect. In fact, this is the very first time I've heard of anybody saying otherwise.
I don't think so, I think the original sentance was supposed to be the only slightly corrected:
One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size.
What he is trying to say here is NOT that the compression you see from plain XML is insignificant. What he's saying is that even though the XML has tags that compress well, the presence of them still adds a very sigifincant amount of overhead even in fully compressed files.
You can think of PDF as essentially XML without tags (or with far shorter tags). Given any PDF and a Metro document with the same content, the Metro document is probably going to be a lot larger even when compressed.
I'm in agreement with the parent poster that there are distinct technicaly advanatges to PDF over any XML based format. I'm a big fan of XML and use it in a lot of places but really it's not meant for everything. What is more important really than a file being XML is the API to whatever file you have behaves like XML. It would be really interesting to see a library that was an XML "parser" that pretended like PDF's were XML and let you traverse/modify them with the same API.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because the PDF format is so open, the entire print industry uses it. Most of the stuff you read in dead tree form was once a PDF. There are several ISO standards for print-ready PDF files, such as PDF/X1a:2003.
Many printers ( not the thing on your desk, the companies that print stuff ) have automated workflows built on PDF. You shovel single-page PDFs in one end, and software that understands that open PDF format looks into each file, determines its page number, places that single-page PDF on a digital "sheet" with other single pages ( called an imposition ), and sends it to a machine that makes printing plates. That platemaker understands the open PDF format and is able to image that "sheet" directly to a plate that is mounted on the press. Automated, without costly human hand-holding made possible because many pieces of software from many companies that are not named Adobe can program to an open standard.
PDF files can also contain JDF data. JDF is XML-based, and it can communicate ( or will communicate ) with many types of printing plant machinery. For example, many printers have robotic paper loading systems, so that imaginary job above that is PDF can tell the paper robot to load the specific paper for that job so that when the plates are loaded on the press, the press can begin printing. The JDF data within that PDF can also tell the paper cutter how to cut the sheets, and/or tell a folder how to fold the sheets.
All this because of how open the PDF format is. And Metro is going to replace all this, particularly with the momentum PDF already has? I think Metro is just a fancy WMF. Microsoft really needs to copy Apple on this and use PDF instead. Talk about NIH.
This was actually pretty easy to see coming (though personally I did not see it).
.Net. In that case they took a whole bunch of Java libraries and the VM, capitalized all the method names and came up with slightly improved VM technology. Instead of working to improve Java VM's they went thier own way and so now we have a huge duplication of effort across the industry as people waste time writing code for both platforms or porting already solid systems from one to the other, and back again.
This just continues farther down the path they already started with
So then why is it at all surprising to see Microsoft instead of embracing yet another industry standard go their own direction, industry duplication be dammned?
The future from this point is pretty easy to see with a great divide of people supporting PDF and people supporting Metro, and a lot of work for document makers and readers in-between.
The fundamental question: does Microsoft have enough momentum to really push Metro everywhere. I think it will be hard as PDF is far more entrenched in many places than Java is/was... then again PDF's in the life of the average consumer have only just started to take off, and they will come at it from that direction (just as they always have).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is why OSX uses PDF as it's native layout language. It has all the benefits a standard brings, and it doesn't cost them.
The real reason is that Microsoft likes to have their own proprietary formats so they can manipulate or make profits from others using it.
Oh... http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/printing/ you mean anything can print to a PDF? Natively? With a built in accelerated viewer? IT'S BEEN OUT ALREADY HOW LONG!?! Uh... nevermind then.
Just the opposite: they should make their product on Windows work so well that it's easier to use it than Metro. If they do this, Metro will die on the vine. If they try to do what you propose, Metro will succeed brilliantly, because it will be your only choice on Windows, and like it or not, the majority of people run Windows. Why do you think you keep getting those silly .doc files in your email? :'}
Adobe has been in the fonts and printing business for decades. What Microsoft does best in this case is come in with a half-ass replacement, market it to destroy Adobe, and then the world is left worse off than before. They've done it to competitors before. I really really hope that never happens, because PDF is so ubiquitous (look at all the platforms their Reader runs on!).
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Once LH achieves more penetration, the Metro format will be the standard,...
People give Microsoft _way_ too much credit. Even in ten years, there will be a very significant population of people _not_ running Longhorn. For example, half my family still uses Windows 98! I will still be using Windows 98 even past Longhorn's launch date, because my main desktop will be centered around Solaris and Linux for years to come.
Add that Microsoft is slipping ever so slowly in share, and I wouldn't be suprised if Longhorn never sees a majority share. Look at China and SE Asia, for example. They're signing deals for Linux desktops. Millions of them.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
And it makes a perfect platform for secure computing and document DRM.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.