June 2, 2006 12:07 PM PDT
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Microsoft said earlier Friday that it expects an antitrust suit from Adobe after months of negotiations in which the companies failed to reach an accord.
The software maker is unilaterally making changes to both Office 2007 and Windows Vista in an effort to assuage some of Adobe's concerns. More important, the move is an attempt to lower the chances that an injunction could stop Microsoft from shipping those products.
"We don't want anything to stand in the way of customers getting their hands on the product," Microsoft Vice President Chris Capossela told CNET News.com in a telephone interview on Friday. "We certainly are trying to be a good partner here."
Microsoft has already had to delay the release date for Windows Vista several times because of technological hurdles. The current plan is to finish development of Office in October, and Vista by November, in order to have a mainstream launch of the products in January.
The company is making two main changes. With Vista, it plans to give computer makers the option of dropping some support for XPS, Microsoft's fixed-format document type that some have characterized as a PDF-killer. Under the changes, Microsoft will still use XPS under the hood to help the operating system print files. But computer makers won't have to include the software that allows users to view XPS files or to save documents as XPS files.
That said, Microsoft doesn't expect many computer makers will choose that option.
"We think it will be rare, because there is value and customers want it," group program manager Andy Simonds told CNET News.com. History may be on Microsoft's side here. The company was ordered by the European Union to offer a version of Windows without a built-in media player. However, manufacturers have shown little or no interest in selling PCs based on the stripped-down operating system.
On the Office side, Microsoft plans to take out of Office 2007 a feature that allows documents to be saved in either XPS or PDF formats. However, consumers will be able to go to Microsoft's Web site and download a patch that will add those capabilities back in.
If customers do that, it will essentially make Office 2007 work the same way as it has in current test versions, including the Beta 2 release that Microsoft made publicly available last week.
Customers will have to go through extra work, though, as they need to both download code and install it before adding back the options.
"It's clearly not as customer-friendly as we would like it to be," Capossela said. Microsoft announced plans for the PDF-saving option in October.
Even if customers don't download the add-on for Office, those running Vista may still be able to save their documents in the XPS format, provided their computer maker has not stripped out Vista's own XPS abilities. In Vista, the print driver can save all files in the XPS format.
Forrester analyst Kyle McNabb said that Microsoft's move to make PDF saving an add-on to Office 2007 won't be a major blow to the new software. "Having to download it and add it will not kill Office 2007," McNabb said. Consumers "will be disappointed, yes, but it won't prevent Office 2007 from moving forward."
Simonds, whose unit develops XPS, said that customers want the fixed document type and doesn't see the additional hurdles hurting XPS' ability to become a universal file format. "We think that value will sort of transcend any of this," he said.
But it will be an added hurdle, Capossela acknowledged. "Clearly, it introduces a barrier, in that customers have to go through another step to make this capability possible," he said.
Adobe developed PDF but has made much of its core technology an open standard. It offers its own PDF reader software for free, while charging for the Acrobat software that creates PDF files. Microsoft maintains that its plan to incorporate a PDF-saving option was on solid legal ground, noting that rivals such as Corel and Sun Microsystems already include such options in their office software products.
McNabb said that regardless of the latest moves, PDF is still the dominant player in the market.
"There is more demand for PDF than XPS," McNabb said. "Even if Microsoft makes XPS free and native (to Office) and users have to download PDF, it will only have a marginal impact on XPS adoption. The market wants PDF."
CNET News.com's Dawn Kawamoto contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
Microsoft Office 2007,
Microsoft Office,
Adobe Systems Inc.,
computer company,
Microsoft Windows Vista
This whole issue all because Adobe is unsure how to get people to continue buying the full version of Acrobat if they can create basic PDFs. So instead, they'll go after Microsoft because screwing with Microsoft is in vogue, or they'll try to use Microsoft to come after us because we are already paying for Microsoft software. (Maybe Microsoft should offer 25 center per copy of Office shipped with the "Save As PDF..." option.) Or maybe it's so that they can later sue if XPS ever gains any traction saying that it's monopolistic because XPS is built into Vista and PDF isn't.
This is a problem of their own making. For most people, a PDF is nothing more than a preservation of formatting. They know nothing of the interactivity (mostly form-based, right? Not sure myself.) that can be accomplished with the PDF format if used in an interactive format with the server code behind it.
Why? Because:
(1) the full version costs so much many haven't purchased it
(2) the full version is such a user-unfriendly engineered piece of dreck with a horrid learning curve and a hauntingly bad user-interface that prevents people from really understanding its full power
If Adobe would get a clue, they would realize that the easier it is to make PDFs, the easier it is to spread the format. They just need to figure out how to market the full version and monetize the free reader. Maybe they could do like Opera and put banner ads in it and offer a $5 or $10 enhanced reader that doesn't have ads.
Why ARE adobe products so expensive and hard to use??? For some specialized niche-market tools, it is somewhat understandable, but why would I pay $200 to create a PDF that COULD do all of this wonderful stuff...if only I had the time to take the tutorial, read the manual, and phone a friend? Don't even get me started on Photoshop or Premier...those products just plain reduced me to tears.
I hope Adobe doesn't touch the interfaces of the interfaces of the Macromedia products.
(2) the full version is such a user-unfriendly engineered piece of dreck with a horrid learning curve and a hauntingly bad user-interface that prevents people from really understanding its full power
"
You could be talking about any Adobe product. :)
Not that they are being forced not to include it Adobe reader is going to continue to run in in system tray on millions of machines nagging the users to download plug-in they don't need or want.
It is sad that a company with a monopoly on PDF software can use antitrust as an excuse to prevent MS from competing against them.
People say MS got off easy by not being split up by the courts, but I disagree.
They are allowed to bundle notepad, solitaire, calculator, and paint. ANY other product they chose to include with Windows leaved them in the cross hairs of the courts.
I think if they were split into 2 smaller, more versatile companies that are legally allowed to actually release products they would be better off.
Get real.
Adobe has been touting Acrobat as open standard that ANYONE and their brother can create and use -- oh, but not Microsoft! As a reasult, all these Office suite competitors have it -- with Adobe's blessing because it's an open standard. Now they are carping because Microsoft wants to joing the party?
How much MS stock do you own?
It looks like Adobe is doing everything they can to insure the success of Microsoft's XPS format.
governments, financial institutions, and businesses many years
ago. These squabbles between Adobe and Microsoft over whose
is bigger won't change that.
Adobe published the PDF specification years ago and gave their
permission for anyone's software to make and use PDF files (as
long as they follow the specification). This means the format wil
be in use as long as anyone wants to use it.
Regardless of the results of this case, no one is going to drop
PDF in favor of MS XPS.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish is still in full force.
Due to lack of competition, Adobe is slacking, not providing any significant innovation to PDF technology for years.
I'm glad there will be a competing format!
world, machines are made PDF capable and the whole workflow
is pure PDF based. It took years to reach this integration and
innovating it every year isn't per-se a good thing, on the
contrary. Its build into printers, what was MS thinking when they
made a 'PDF killer"?
osX embraced the technology and integrated it, PDF printing and
fast viewing is available systemwide for many years now. Just
make a better PDF viewer and get over it, MS can't dominate
every market.
My puter won't run Adobe Reader.
PDF is clumsy to use.
PDF is not secure. Look at all the recent governmental 'leaks' by PDF being copied and pasted.
Going to a website and being forced to download a PDF file just to get information that could/should have have been put in HTML is simply SENSELESS and an incovenience to Readers of that website.
Could go on, but I think you get my point ;)
By default, if you convert files to PDF, it is not secure, you can delete pages, copy text, print etc.
But with setting of password security, digital signatures, and digital certificates nicely available in Acrobat, you can restrict printing, restrict editing, copying etc. Advance security would be with the Adobe Policy Server, you can even set expiry dates on the PDF. If that idiot knows that this PDF is to be made public, he had better secure it. If it's not, then it's his fault.
Information in HTML? Try printing that out. You get crappy spacing, fonts and tabs. But with PDF, what you see is what you get as you print it. Plus, if I already have the information in another copy, I can just convert them into PDF and upload to the website instead of coding it in or copy, cut and paste into HTML, whatever. Then I don't need to worry about whether it'll fit a 800x600 or 1024x768 or whatever that's 'best viewed'.
It's not a technology problem, it's user problem. As always.
And strange it comes out just when Microsoft is trying to push
their new PDF competitor. It looks like just a propaganda
campaign on Microsoft's part. Microsoft is only saying they're
expecting to be sued, not that Adobe has done anything except
try to negotiate some money for Microsoft to use a library Adobe
wrote.
I personally think Microsoft's pretty much making the whole
thing up, and c|net doesn't have the resources to fact-check a
story.
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Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701361
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701361
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701361
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701361
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701361
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=188701361
But it is important to remember that Adobe is an open, yet proprietary, specification. It publishes the specs for its PDF versions (see the 1200+ page PDF 1.6 Developers Manual).
According to Adobe, the PDF specification remains under Adobe?s control so it can be quickly adapted to meet new needs, such as the bar-code capability recently added.
That's great, go Adobe go. But don't claim openness, receive all of the goodwill of being open, and then be closed while still trying to be open. Open or closed...which is it?
Gutierrez said: "They want us to charge our customers even though pdf is a royalty-free license - it's free in Star Office, in Open Office and in Apple, so we'd be the only ones charging for it.
"We expect a legal letter from them but their position differs 180 degrees from previous public statements."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/05/microsoft_adobe_legal_spat/print.html
and this is one of the previous statements:
"Adobe publishes the PDF standard in its entirety and makes it available for free, without restrictions, to anyone who cares to use it," Adobe Senior Director of Public Policy Michael Engelhardt wrote last year in a letter to a Massachusetts state senator. "No one needs permission from Adobe to build their own product with the PDF standard."
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j
- Adobe says one thing, but does the opposite
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by ChazzMatt
June 5, 2006 11:28 PM PDT
- Microsoft associate general counsel Horacio Gutierrez: "We've been discussing this for several weeks, and of course have been partners for many years, but talks have now ended. It concerns Office and the "save as" feature. In the end we agreed to remove the features and make them downloadable by customers, but Adobe felt this was not enough.
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See all 40 Comments >>Gutierrez said: "They want us to charge our customers even though pdf is a royalty-free license - it's free in Star Office, in Open Office and in Apple, so we'd be the only ones charging for it.
"We expect a legal letter from them but their position differs 180 degrees from previous public statements."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/05/microsoft_adobe_legal_spat/print.html
and THIS is one of the previous statements:
"Adobe publishes the PDF standard in its entirety and makes it available for free, without restrictions, to anyone who cares to use it," Adobe Senior Director of Public Policy Michael Engelhardt wrote last year in a letter to a Massachusetts state senator. "No one needs permission from Adobe to build their own product with the PDF standard."
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j