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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."
Gee a coperation is trying to ensure that the market remains in a state of monopolistic competition instead of perfect competition. Big surprise!
Philosophy.
I think Microsoft is just getting a taste of its own medicine. If you're going to try and monopolize a field, you should expect your competitors to fight back the same way.
So we'll just download CutePDF for free. Next problem.
What if Adobe realized that MS was probably going to bastardize their PDF and simply didn't want MS to have a free reign with it?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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...
I was under the impression that the PDF file format was an open standard and that Adobe Acrobat was proprietary software that could create and manipulate PDF files. In other words, if you would like for your software to work with PDF files you can either license code from them (some form of Acrobat) or roll your own.
I guess I was misunderinformed?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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?
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?
It seems like Acrobat is falling from it's peak. I know the PDF format is a defacto standard. However, the Adobe seems to be having problems on some fronts. One thing I've noticed, and I realize this is a loose correlation, is that when a company starts to fall it's products start to come with some interesting "features".
Real Player: Naging upgrade notices whenver you didn't have the most recent version. Hard to find "free" version. Addware in the install.
AIM has come with it's own supply of programs, ranging from advertising AOL Explorer to some programs it installed to play AIM mini games (I've forgoten which one since I uninstalled it a while ago, but it set off alerts in Ad-Aware)
Yahoo!: Cluttered their home page with a whole bunch of adverts.
Adobe: Acrobat Reader now tries to install Yahoo! Toolbar by default.
Just seems like whenever a company starts bundling adds and addware programs with their software they start to fall from grace. Anyone have any other examples of software companies tanking like that?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
You know there are other free alternatives for creating PDF files on the windows platform besides Adobe Std. Edition, right?
There's two very good reasons for Adobe denying easy PDF functionality to Microsoft Office users. One is obvious and good only for Adobe, but the other is subtle and better for everybody in the long run.
The obvious reason? Adobe wants to be able to sell Acrobat Pro to its users, and if Microsoft starts bundling the functionality in Office, Office users will have less reason to buy Acrobat or the Creative Suite.
Note: I said less reason, not no reason. See, Acrobat is more than Distiller. The full Acrobat program will let you take those PDFs you've created by whatever means, resequence the pages, add footnotes... organize the whole document. You could do that in Word, but you could end up with a single huge document, and Word isn't happy working that way. The full kit lets you shuffle pages, up to and including replacing single pages in a PDF if you must.
The other reason has to do with Microsoft's hamfisted, even predatory way of "supporting" other peoples' standards. How does that sequence go, again? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Extort? Picture the Microsoft PDF format, in the same ridiculing manner that you'd consider Microsoft RTF, Microsoft HTML, and Microsoft XML: misshapen parodies of their former, more open, more rational selves. By denying Microsoft the opportunity to implement the standard, Adobe protects it for themselves and anyone else who adheres to it.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Play out the scenarios. Ask yourself what Adobe could usefully say in that situation. Microsoft can't openly vandalize .pdf just yet, for reasons we all know too well, so this move just lets them make Adobe look bad. It's a set up for later. It's a damn shame all Adobe's other options are worse.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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!
Remember folks, Microsoft is developing their own page presentation format (formerly "Metro", now xps) that's going to compete directly with pdf. Remember what happened when Microsoft decided they wanted their own audio codec? They made wma the default format in Windows Media Player, but also included annoyingly limited "support" for mp3. Whenever a user ripped a CD to mp3 format, WMP would pop up a nag screen suggesting that they use wma instead, and if the user ignored the suggestion, he got a nasty-sounding 64kbps file.
I suspect they planned to include crippled pdf support in Office 2007 with bloated output, arbitrary resolution limits, and nag screens suggesting that using xps would make the document look better. Adobe (unlike Fraunhofer) saw what MS was doing, and told them to bug off.
0 1 - just my two bits
In the news : "Microsoft will emerge a new standard called :"throwing chairs in the right directions"". I bet they will ensure that the market remains in a state of monopolistic competition there too!
No sig for now.
I don't get this argument by Adobe. This software, PDFCREATOR, is free and lets you convert any document (including MS Office documents) to PDF.
What's the big deal? Is it that Adobe knows most users don't know that you don't have to buy Adobe Acrobat to make a PDF?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
It depends on the software, but the Mac OS X Save As PDF most certainly does not just save an image inside the PDF. The text is fully selectable/searchable.
The greater question is what does Microsoft want to do with the Open Standard PDF. There is certain functionality of PDF that is included in the standard, and then are other parts that set it apart from the Adobe Acrobat Distiller product. Much of Adobe's use of PDF is set around print production and such is proprietary to their products. Many of these features do not react the way you would expect in program's like Apple's preview or other PDF viewers. There are a number of compression technologies that are not accessible outside of Acrobat Distiller. The question in my mind is does Microsoft want to include proprietary functions in their save to PDF functionality, or are they simply trying to print a PDF to a file?
If Microsoft is just going to use the open standard then there is not much Adobe can do. Example, Apple removed Display PostScript from the developer previews of Mac OS X because they did not want to pay for the licensing involved with Display PostScript. Instead they built their display model on the open PDF standard. They do not use Adobe code in their product.
Now that said if you open a complex Adobe PDF in Apple's preview IT WILL NOT LOOK CORRECT, especially if their is transparency in the document.
The other end of the spectrum is, does Microsoft want to "embrace and extend" the tehnology much like they did with JAVA, basically bastardazing the product and killing it for all intents and purposes so that they can push their own technology.
A PDF that doesn't open in Adobe Reader is pretty much useless. Microsoft doesn't make a PDF reader, so there's no reason for them to "extend" the PDF spec.
Now, I suppose it's possible that MS will create PDFs that open slowly, or cause Reader to crash sometimes or something foul of that nature. But it's more likely that Adobe is just freaking out because of the potential lost revenue.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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)
Microsoft seems to be playing the wounded duck at the moment, trying to convince the public that Adobe won't allow them to implement PDF creation as a standard feature in their Office 2007 and Vista environments.
However, Adobe has published the Portable Document Format specifications since 1993, encouraging developers to create applications that both read and *write* PDF files. From page seven of the PDF Reference, Fifth Edition (v1.6, PDF format) we see the following:
My guess would be that in typical Microsoft style, they are probably wanting to create their own incompatable extensions to PDF and Adobe has stepped-in and said no to them.
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!!
At the risk of being redundant, I would just like to say that Apple does NOT license PDF from Adobe (OO I'm not so sure since it originates in Star Office which is from Sun). Adobe wanted Apple to license PDF back when the Quartz PDF graphic engine replaced the Postscript graphic engine (which was licensed from Adobe) from the NeXT days, but Apple declined and instead based their engine on the openly available PDF standard. This is also the reason that there are free PDF libraries for anything from Java to Perl. None of them are licensed but simply implement the standard.
Microsoft's attempt must use features that are not part of the standard, such as Layers or advanced color features.
This might be redundant, but here goes...
Now, I'm a die-hard Mac user, and a big OOo supporter, but let's face it-- they don't have a whole lot of market share. Very little, in fact, compared to Microsoft's products. Not only that, but the market share they do have is much more technology-oriented.
Picture this scenario. Boss Billy walks down to Jim in Accounting, and tells Jim that he wants the company's annual financial report in his inbox by 2:00 that afternoon. Oh, and make it a PDF. I'd be willing to bet you the first thought through Jim's mind isn't "Ooh, I'd better download OpenOffice" or "Let me download a copy of CutePDF." The average computer user isn't very enlightened concerning those kinds of things. What Jim will think is "Hmm, PDF... that's Adobe, isn't it? Let me run down to OfficeMax and buy it."
Adobe doesn't care if the relatively small percentage of Mac and OOo users has access to PDF support (as everyone is supposed to, if it truly is an open format), but if Office implements the technology, Microsoft has just started cutting into their Average Joe User market share-- which is where they make the most of their money I'm sure.
The other major portion of their market share probably comes from professional designers who need more power than what's provided by free Postscript printers and OpenOffice.org. If Office implements parts of the PDF standard that aren't found in the free products, that starts chipping away at another part of their market share. If Microsoft jumps on board with PDF (like everyone else did years ago), Adobe faces a very steep, very fast drop in their Acrobat market share.
So what do they do? They try to pull a Microsoft-style monopoly move and say "Oh, yeah, that whole thing about open standard? That doesn't apply to you. We really own it." As they say, money talks, and if MS puts PDF support in office... to Adobe, money walks.
From that link:
Standard PDF isFact is, they earned their reputation. A careful reading of what's in that post says volumes: nowhere in that do they promise not to. They don't consume it? Why is standard PDF "an option" then? What's going to read the non-standard PDF they can produce?
Here's what Microsoft needs to say:
And that, would be the end, of that.As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Our you could get PDFCreator from Sourceforge and print to PDF from any Windows application.
The hypocrisy on this site is astounding.
6 /02/XPSAdobe.aspx/ 02/613702.aspx/ 03/616022.aspx
Consider this:
1. Adobe's market share in PDF creation software is similar to Microsoft's marketshare in desktop OSes for intel-compatible CPUs. Therefore, one could argue that Adobe has a "monopoly" in pdf creation software (not 100% share, but nearly so). But to keep some of you from bitching about the use of the term "monopoly" in this case, I'll use the term "quasi-monopoly".
2. Adobe, wanting to protect their "quasi-monopoly", was willing to allow Microsoft Office 2007 to export PDF if Microsoft charged extra for that functionality so as to not undercut the price of Adobe's own PDF creation software. In other words, Adobe wanted to engage in price-fixing with Microsoft in order to protect Adobe's quasi-monopoly. That is what you guys are supporting! Do you really want to go down that road? Surely you'll want to rethink your position, or does your hypocrisy really go that far?
3. Microsoft wasn't bastardizing PDF. What would be the point, since Microsoft is not producing any PDF reader? Since Microsoft isn't creating their own reader, any PDF document producted by Microsoft Office would have to be readable by other readers (and printable by printers), so why bastardize the format? Think logically.
4. If you want to see an example of the PDF produced by Office 2007, try Office 2007 beta 2. Or you can read the PDF version of the latest draft of the OpenXML ECMA spec, a PDF document that was created by Office 2007 beta. Guess what, it's perfectly readable by Acrobat Reader and any other PDF compliant reader.
5. Regarding XPS, XPS is a PDF competitor based on XML, but includes many advances over the current PDF spec (though future PDF specs may add such advances). XPS is part of Vista; XPS's role in Vista is similar to PDF's role in Mac OS X. Microsoft has shared with Adobe info on XPS for several years. Now Microsoft, bending over backwards to allay Adobe's hypocritcal paranoia, is removing from Office 2007 built-in support for both PDF and XPS. Furthermore, Microsoft is leaving it up to OEMs as to whether they want to include XPS support in Vista itself (except for XPS's role as a spool file format for Vista's printing enhacements).
6. Lastly, Microsoft is still going to provide PDF and XPS export support in Office 2007 as free downloadable plug-ins. Adobe's still pissed about this because they want Microsoft to charge for the plug-ins (more of the price-fixing scheme that you guys are supporting).
See these links for sources of the above info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/andy_simonds/archive/2006/0
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/06
Lastly, please don't you (or the state of MA) ever refer to PDF as "open" in the future. If it's not open for all, then it's not truly open, period.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Absolutely, positively untrue, and I can't imagine where you cooked this idea up from.
Pretty much every program on the planet can print to Postscript, (that's certainly not an image-only format) and it's just a short jump from there to converting it into a PDF.
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.
Xenu loves you!
"Microsoft doesn't make a PDF reader, so there's no reason for them to "extend" the PDF spec."
Yes they do, and yes there is. The reader is called "Microsoft Office". Microsoft wants you to have to buy an expensive piece of Microsoft software in order to read what is otherwise a freely available document format (PDF). That is the reason Microsoft will gladly EEE Adobe's PDF.
Adobe may be evil for what they did to Dmitry Skylarov, but they don't hold a candle to Microsoft.
ISO 19005-1 is PDF 1.4. There's a little bit more to just needing to be a pdf 1.4 in order to be compliant to ISO 19005-1. , such as no javascript allowed in the pdf, no encryption and all fonts must be embedded
Beating up people in little rooms, if you do it for a good reason you do it for a bad one.