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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 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.
MS Office 2007 can do PDFs better than either the postscript route or OOo (sans any custom macros.) Not just a conversion of a postscript file, but a tagged and bookmarked PDF.
I suspect that this is the part that Adobe is balking at -- that anyone would care and duplicate the beyond-standard work that they do with PDFmaker, to the point where someone with MS office really doesn't need to contact them anymore.
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.
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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?
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- 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
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.
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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.
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.