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."

Comments

Re:Maybe Adobe just got smart.

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:What is the status of PDF then?

[TheRaven64]

The PDF Specification is freely available to anyone. Adobe can not stop implementers of the spec from creating PDF documents. They have two potential legal arguments that they can use:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Re:Serves them right.

[peragrin]

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)