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MS Four Points of Interoperability and Adobe
Andy Updegrove writes "Recently, spokespersons for Microsoft's standards group have been promoting 'design, collaboration and licensing' as alternatives, rather than supplements to, open standards. There's an important difference between an open standard and any of these ad hoc arrangements among companies, however, and that is the fact that with a standard, everybody knows that they can get what everybody else can get, and on substantially the same terms. With a de facto standard, that's not the case - as Microsoft itself found out last week when Adobe refused to offer the same deal on saving files in PDF form that Apple and OpenOffice enjoy."
I have used a postscript printer driver, print-> save to file, then ps2pdf to make pdf files in the past when I did not have the Adobe software. Works fine and is free.
This is silly for Adobe to not let MS use pdf functionality. How is it even up to Adobe if the specification is out there for anyone to use? For once, it seems like MS should just include this function for the common good.
I wonder if MS is spinning "the breakdown of talks" so that they don't need an actual useful standard in office, so they can push their "pdf killer". The only thing that will kill PDF is a big old EMP...
If I want to send someone a .doc file right now, I can use (for example), MS Office or Open Office to get the job done. If I want to send a pdf, I either use Open Office, or I have to buy Adobe's Standard Edition to get a plugin for MS Office.
.pdf.
.pdf support into Office 2007, I can't see .pdf leaping forward in terms of a distribution format for documents.
So given that I exclusively use MS Office at work (say what you will, but the licensing program for colleges is decent value), I'm unlikely to want to pay extra £££s to use
Now that MS will apparently not bundle native
Are Adobe trying to shoot themselves in the foot on this, or am I missing something crucial?
yeah, like anybody is going to trust a company that bundles spyware with their products
My understanding is that if Adobe is talking about taking Anti-Trust action against Microsoft it isn't Adobe acting as "the inventors of PDF" it's Adobe acting as "the leading seller of PDF solutions". The fact that they have a special relationship to the PDF format is incidental to the proposed action.
They're complaining that Microsoft is destroying a market by bundingly software functionality with their system. Is this in any way different than when Microsoft bundled IE to hurt Netscape? If so, can someone explain it to me?
Not far fetched. Yes, it's "Adobe PDF format". But if MS decides that X has to be Y, it is. No matter what the originator of the format, even if he holds the patents to it, says. MS wants to read it this way, so it has to be read that way.
Don't believe it? Try HTML.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, the way I see it MS aren't bundling PDF software with their system - they were planning on including it with Office. I don't see how anti-trust applies in that case, as other office suites already do the same (eg OOo), so they're not using their monopoly position in OSes to push into another area (PDF creation tools), they're just following the same path as their nearest competitor.
Of course, IANAL, so perhaps anti-trust law really does prevent them from doing that, although it wouldn't seem fair (assuming that the purpose of anti-trust law is to prevent unfair competition, not prevent any competition at all).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
- That they had a prior contract with MS, which MS are now violating. This might have been signed way-back when Microsoft wanted Adobe's Acrobat Distiller to support MS Office.
- That Microsoft, by implementing the features of their software in Office, is abusing their de facto monopoly in the office suite market.
The first argument would only work if such a contract existed, and the second only works if they can find a court that Microsoft can't just buy off (see Netscape for how well that worked in the past). It sounds just like sabre rattling to me. If Adobe decide to make the next version of PDF require an implementers license, then I suspect they will find a competing standard exists very quickly. Or people just stick with PDF 1.6; I don't think I've used any features that were introduced after 1.4 at the very latest and I create PDFs regularly.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You know there are other free alternatives for creating PDF files on the windows platform besides Adobe Std. Edition, right?
Does anyone else think it's possible that the whole Microsoft XML Paper Specification "PDF rival" was invented purely as a bargaining tool against Adobe -- something to threaten them with if Adobe don't agree to let them put PDF functionality into Office?
Think about the timing. They revealed that they were making XPS just before they needed to get the relevant permission from Adobe. If it's *not* just a bargaining stunt, then this is incredibly stupid timing by Microsoft - angering Adobe before having to beg their permission. I don't think MS is that stupid. If it is, then if MS they play their cards close to their chest, they can get the necessary permission from Adobe by offering to drop XPS -- permission that they might not have got otherwise.
nd very much doesn't want.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Microsoft has, so far, been completely unwilling to make themselves compatible with formats such as OpenDocument for the explicit purpose of keeping their own proprietary format the "standard" and stifling their competition. But now that they see a semi-open format that's popular, viable, and really does suit a lot of common purposes much better than anything else available, they suddenly want in on the action. Sounds like a double standard if ever I've heard one. I'm not entirely thrilled with any restriction on open formats and interoperability; but with a situation like this, where a company like Microsoft is clearly trying to profit from it on the one hand while killing it with the other, I'm completely in favor of letting them get a taste of their own medicine.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I think that PDF is a great standard but the Adobe Acrobat that you currently pay for is a horrible application.
This is a product costing hundreds of dollars (i have pro), it's buggy, doesnt work well with firefox, the process will just hang there soaking the CPU for all it's worth after it's reader application is closed, jilts me with pop up windows telling me there are updates and when I go to install them gives me errors every time. It sucks.
PDF995 for example does the same thing more reliably than the developer of the PDF standard for free (ad supported) or for $10 if you want to get rid of the ads.
Adobe I think here is making a huge mistake, they should just license the damn format to Microsoft for a $20 per unit royalty under a restriction that MSFT doesnt include their "pdf-killer" format and ditch the Acrobat pro line.
In picking this fight with Microsoft now they certainly have awoken the sleeping dragon and I'm sure they are pissed. Allowing Apple and Sun to do something (MSFTs biggest competitors) but changing the rules for Microsoft?
The Gates borg army has been on R&R for a while but I think he's going to restore all the troops into active duty to kill Adobe now. Expect Microsoft to release a really good professional grade video and graphics suites while railing hard against PDF with their new format.
bubye Adobe, was nice to know ya!
Yep and I personally know of a 100 million dollars worth of presses that will only rip from PDF.
If XPS is going to be worth anything, it needs to operate on more than just vista. Otherwise it's useless to those presses.
So what's worth more several billion dollars for the printing industry who have for years used PDF to it's fullest or forcing that entire industry to change to something that isn't available to anyone other than MSFT. (hint the printing industry utilizes lot's of macs as well as windows machines)
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If XPS is going to be worth anything, it needs to operate on more than just vista. Otherwise it's useless to those presses.
You're absolutely correct. But industrial manifacturers, like big presses are not what marketers call "early adopters" at all.
XPS is far superior in their support alpha blends, composite modes, primitives, bitmap transforms and so on compared to PDF-s. Lots of printer manifacturers have working models of their printers with full XPS support.
XPS is the designer's dream. Even if he'll have to go through hell to get his work to print in massive quantities, he has flexible tools and rapid prototyping just using XPS and an XPS printer. I advice you to read up on the XPS features and tools that will support it.
Once you get the innovative core audience interested, and the support of the major printer manifacturers, it's a matter of time that it becomes widespread. And one day, the big clunky conservative presses may move to XPS too.
Are any of these likely? We'll almost certainly have an answer by the time Vista comes out, and quite possibly by the time XP or 2003 have another service pack. We do know for certain that they've never liked being spurned and their competitors have a strange habit of dying terrible deaths.
Are Adobe aware of this? Oh, almost certain. They're almost guaranteed to be just as aware that allies of Microsoft have an equally strange reduction in their life expectancy. In the most recent case, Microsoft worked with anti-virus companies then bought one out and produced their own. Oddly, it seems to recognize some of the competing anti-virus products as hostile and destroy them. Curious, that.
My guess is that Adobe takes the line that if they're going to die, they might as well die with their boots on, and there's a slim chance Microsoft won't dare crush them with all of the other anti-trust cases going on, but that if they go with Microsoft, they don't stand a chance. That's based on what has visibly occurred, however, and Adobe's actual (but not necessarily stated) reasons may be very different.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's not like Acrobat is a cash cow for Adobe or anything! Most people in my workplace only know about Acrobat for making PDFs and snub their noses at anything "free software" because they equate it with shareware. By including PDF support in office Microsoft wipes a good 10%++ easily from Adobe's sales. Apple has PDF because they are co-owners of postscript with adobe.. so much of the early work for photoshop and such was done between Adobe and Apple that Apple has a cross-license for the techonology. OpenOffice.org and all the free PDF makers only use the open parts of the specs. There's quite a bit of the DRM stuff that they can't use because it's not all open and that pesky DMCA. Also, many of the projects are not US based so their rules are slightly different. Now that Adobe is abandoning Apple for windows, they're getting really scared Microsoft will finish cutting them off!!
All that I can relate is my 'user experience' which is that Adobe actively breaks the PDF standard and/or extends it to break it every few years. I paid a considerable amount of money ($300) for Adobe Acrobat 4.0 back when that was current. I did so because I wanted to use it for old document archiving. Since then, Adobe has gone the (common these days) path of having expensive 'tiered' versions of Acrobat, and my investment of $300 is now crippling, because my Acrobat 4.0 won't 'read' the newer PDFs that many organizations are now 'publishing.'
In my experience Adobe's PDF (as opposed to the Ghostscript-derived versions I use on freenixes) is an extend-and-break format that Adobe uses to force upgrades. I do NOT want to throw away my editing/creation tool by downloading some crappy 'free reader.' Also, the Adobe "free" readers have lately become gargantual bloatware monsters, with spyware links and nagware built right into the menu bar.
I can't think of a better fitting pair of companies to enjoy watch rip each other's throats out than Microsoft and Adobe.
Further, has everybody forgotten the Adobe persection of the ebook dude? Fuck Adobe.
1) I notice the source is listed as MS
2) A day or two ago many were listing a substantially different version of this same story. That time it was nailed to a press release where MS was speculating to itself in public.
3) Is there any evidence that Adobe is even involved in this? I hate to think of them as "good guys" in even a relative sense, but I suspect that they may have had no input into this at all. That this is purely MS managing the news so that when they don't include "save to pdf" they've got a sympathetic public.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not quite. He said graphic designers use macs extensively not exclusively. For Microsoft to put out XPS without mac software to manipulate XPS files is indeed a shot in the foot. It an insdutry that is primarily mac based with a huge hurdle to adoption and eventual use. Had they made a specification that was platform neutral, there would be less of a hurdle to experimentation and eventual widespread use. They're trying to force shops to go all windows to begin with, which is stupid. His statment about non-neutrality being a foot-shot is perfectly compatible with the fact that most shops use macs as their platform of choice. I mean, if you think about it, platform neutrality is the best way for microsoft to break into the priting industry.
There is a third option. PDF may be a registered trademark of Adobe. Or, since most lusers have no idea what a file extension is, MS may have named the save option "save as Acrobat".
One big problem with getting your legal news online is that you get a distorted version of the facts. In this matter, there are three points of view: MS's PoV, Adobe's PoV, and the truth.
Seeing as how MS pulled vice fighting, they were probably in the wrong.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Bend it and twist it, but there's no proof that Adobe was even in a meeting with Microsoft about the subject...
It's ALL speculation, so discounting speculation other than your own is moronic.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Those high-end presses mostly don't run the Adobe RIP; last I looked, they ran the Harlequin RIP. And that RIP will soon support XPS:
http://www.globalgraphics.com/xps/
Full disclosure: I used to work on the core RIP team on the Harlequin RIP.
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