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MS Four Points of Interoperability and Adobe

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the learning-experience dept.

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."

4 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Serves them right. by Mikachu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Serves them right. by suv4x4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Serves them right :)? Don't be ridiculous. Adobe has more to lose by denying PDF support in Office than MS.

      The decision to support PDF was long delayed and we all knew it was because MS doesn't want to give PDF an edge in their own products, thus contributing further to the spread use of the format.

      This is why the decision to support PDF in 2007 was a surprise. But now that Adobe is acting like a spoiled brat, Microsoft will remove the PDF support.

      It's really amusing Adobe doesn't want Microsoft to support PDF, given Microsoft has prepared a quite capable PDF competitor itself called XML Paper Specification (XPS), with superior features to those found in PDF (since it's newer, I'm not saying PDF can't catch up of course)...

      Why the heck is this so familiar to me? Ah yea, I remember. Sun sued Microsoft for their Java support in Windows/IE. Microsoft removed (again) the support and we know where Java is today in terms of client-side browser applets.

      At the same time Microsoft has managed to spread wide their version of Java: .NET.

      Expect the same to happen with XPS.

    2. Re:Serves them right. by mdfst13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Yeah, everywhere. It's called AJAX."

      Uhm...you do realize that the J in AJAX stands for *Javascript* right? And that Javascript has *nothing* to do with Java (other than the name and a few similarities of syntax), right?

      I agreed with the rest of your post, but calling AJAX Java is clearly wrong.

      Btw, I suspect that the main reason why Microsoft was going to support PDF was to ease the transition from XPS. Microsoft would be able to talk to printers that understood *either* XPS or PDF. That would allow people to do their work in XPS, show it to others in small quantities in XPS, and then mass produce in PDF. If the mass produced PDF was inferior to the XPS samples, then that gives Microsoft leverage with the printers to switch to something XPS compatible.

      Now, Microsoft will have to spend a lot more money up front to get XPS support into hardware. In the beginning, Microsoft will offer brilliant tools and technical assistance to printer manufacturers who wanted to offer XPS support. In five to ten years, they will charge money to not display warnings that the device is not XPS certified.

      The real question is what's stopping them from doing that? It's only money. They have plenty. This is probably the correct decision for Adobe. However, Microsoft is still fully capable of moving into the market. It's just going to be a bit harder now.

  2. Microsoft Sandbox Full of Pinworm(TM) by Crash+Culligan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.