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."

Managing the Market

Gee a coperation is trying to ensure that the market remains in a state of monopolistic competition [wikipedia.org] instead of perfect competition [wikipedia.org]. Big surprise!

Serves them right.

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.

Re:Serves them right.

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.

Re:Serves them right.

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)

Re:Serves them right.

"Once you get the innovative core audience interested, and the support of the major printer manifacturers, it's a matter of time that it becomes widespread. And one day, the big clunky conservative presses may move to XPS too."

MS may have a competitor to PDF, but they have nothing that competes with Photoshop or Illustrator. Even if they did, I think the tight integration of PDF into the CS2 workflow would keep most designers exactly where they are, and, consequently, keep printers right where they are as well. XPS is only as pretty as it is widely used, which is to say, not very. Adobe can catch up, and most likely will.

The question that arises, though, is when is MS going to buy Quark? They're already working on some code to compete with Adobe on the creative end, but I've always wondered why they don't just go after InDesign's biggest competitor.

Re:Serves them right.

"Adobe has more to lose by denying PDF support in Office than MS."

Au contraire.

Adobe is facing the same thing that Sun was facing with Java. Microsoft's strategy is to take a standard, be it an open standard or a commercial de-facto standard and change it in some way to make it ever so slightly incompatible. The people who use Microsoft's "new standard" find out that interoperating with real standards-following software is unreliable and that the only way to get "interoperability" is to buy more Microsoft licenses.

I believe it's called "embrace, extend, and extinguish"

Since Microsoft has a track record of doing this, Adobe's paranoia is entirely justified.

"Sun sued Microsoft for their Java support in Windows/IE."

Because Microsoft was throwing dead goats in the Java compatibility well. DuH.

"Java is today in terms of client-side browser applets"

Yeah, everywhere. It's called AJAX.

Bad troll, no cookie.

--
BMO

Re:Serves them right.

"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.

Cute PDF

So we'll just download CutePDF [cutepdf.com] for free. Next problem.

Maybe Adobe just got smart.

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?

Re:Maybe Adobe just got smart.

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:Maybe Adobe just got smart.

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.

Actually it's far fetched. Microsoft just added an exporter, not a reader. The only popular and common way to see and print a PDF yet is the Adobe Reader (and some other Adobe products).

Thus, either is Microsoft producing PDF-s that open and print in Reader, or their PDF support will just be useless.

Bend it and twist it, but there's no sign that Microsoft wanted to bastardize the PDF format.

What I actually believe they wanted, is to put PDF support in, and then become really agressive with their "own" PDF: the XPS.

In that case, their support for PDF will be a really strong point when Adobe eventually files an Antithrust case against Microsoft for trying to push PDF out of the market by implementing XPS in their Windows OS. Microsoft will say "but we also support PDF in Office".

Of course now that it's not part of Office, Microsoft can still claim all of best of intentions, so they still hold that card, and Adobe just lost what could've been a good thing for the PDF adoption and acceptance as a standard.

save as file using ps printer, ps2pdf

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...

Re:save as file using ps printer, ps2pdf

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.

What is the status of PDF then?

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?

Re:What is the status of PDF then?

The PDF Specification [adobe.com] 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.

.doc vs .pdf

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.

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 .pdf.

Now that MS will apparently not bundle native .pdf support into Office 2007, I can't see .pdf leaping forward in terms of a distribution format for documents.

Are Adobe trying to shoot themselves in the foot on this, or am I missing something crucial?

Re:.doc vs .pdf

How much do you want to bet Microsoft flatly refused to bind themselves to writing .pdf's readable by code implementing only Adobe's spec?

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.

Who's this going to hurt?

The big question is who's going to be hurt by this... and I suppose that it'll be Microsoft Office users... I'd bet that the resulting PDFs from MS's implementation would probably be a bit more efficient than some of the "print to PDF" programs available for free.

Unless, of course, MS was "embracing and extending" and their PDFs look as horrible as their Save as HTML documents.

Re:Who's this going to hurt?

Print to PDFs work by printing the document as an "image" and then essentially saving that inside of a PDF.

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.

I think people are getting confused about this...

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?

Re:I think people are getting confused about this.

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).

Where would we be without standards?

A serious question: when has a company's non-standard product significanly benefited the consumer? Or indeed the public at large?

Now, I don't mean standard and in "usual" - I mean standard as in "Serving as or conforming to a standard of measurement or value".

For example, those non-standard screws on some electronic devices. The manufacturer would have you believe that those are there to protect the integrity and quality of the product: but I think they just serve to obfuscate and generate revenue for the manufacturer.

After all, how would it be a bad thing if all MP3 players conformed to standard guidelines for portable devices? How would it be a bad thing if I could build and expand my own MP3 player adding features (like a camera or microphone) and enhancing it's function? How would it be a bad thing if all MP3 players ran a standard software operating system of some sort?

How would that be bad for the consumer?

It would seem to me that perhaps standards mean less choice for the manufacturers and more choice for the consumers. Since the opposite is likely true, I would argue this is must be why standards are so difficult to agree upon.
--
Music should be free [w33t.com]

Acrobat Falling?

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?

It's not only that Adobe fears for market share

It fears for the souvereignity over their own format. As funny as it may sound.

Say MS includes PDF writing (and maybe reading) ability into Word. And MS decides that its PDF can also support any arbitrary feature that Adobe didn't plan to implement.

Suddenly, Adobe would have to redo MS's work to stay compatible to its own format! Yes, it wouldn't be "official" standard, but since MS-Office is so widely used, whatever MS-Word sets as the PDF standard would be the de facto standard.

Go Adobe!

Normally I'd be against any big company refusing to license standards like this, but the hell with it – this is Microsoft we're talking about, and I'd have to say that siding with Adobe on this one's probably the lesser of two evils. I have to agree with them, really – Microsoft really is just overstepping their lines, and I hope that eventually one of the anti-trust things finally does succeed against them.

Microsoft Sandbox Full of Pinworm(TM)

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.

Why Adobe are fighting this

The thing is, as I see it, adobe were happy for Openoffice and apple to use their formats, it provides them with greater userbase who use pdf's, and that's good for business. Neither of these two groups are likely to alter the format. Linux has plenty of pdf tools, and adobe have no issue with this. They control the format themselves, and none of the pdf work happening for linux is in anyway threatening, it's just useful to adobe, as it gets their format widely used, keeping it in the public eye. Microsoft need pdf more than adobe need microsoft is what it boils down to. Microsoft want a product to rival or replace the pdf. If they have pdf as a save option, but also their own format, then users get to choose. If pdf is better then the mircosoft format, then people will use that, but what happens when microsoft start bigging up their own format? Well they 'played fair', and included the pdf option, and yes customers used it, but it becomes 'no longer recommended', and msword issue a harmless (but consistant) warning that some features of your Word originated document may not translate well to pdf, and users stop saving to pdf... If vista can view the microsoft format without additional tools, then users will take the shortest/easiest path, and eventually ignore pdf as a save option, killing adobe pdf as a tool used by business. I imagine that's the plan anyway, and I think this is what adobe are thinking. Alas microsoft have consistantly failed to get the interoperability argument. They see the solution as 'well, everyone should use our stuff then'. That isn't the answer. This is all academic to me though, I dumped M$office last year for Openoffice, and have no plan to buy office 12 or Vista.

XPS just a bargaining tool?

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.

Fair's Fair, and Double Standard's Aren't

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.

Adobe Sucks

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!

This is mp3 vs. wma all over again...

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.

PDFCReator

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/ [sourceforge.net]

Probably not a smart move for Adobe..

Now this means Microsoft has to come up with something else similar to PDF to fulfill it's needs. End result, the release of Vista will mean the end of PDF. Well, it probably wont happen that smoothly, but it is in Adobe's best interests to have as much of the market share as possible. With MS's huge market share, having MS on your side means you have 85% of the market by default, not having MS on your side means you're limited to no more then 85% of the market.
I'm sure Adobe is counting on people making a DL from them for just a reader, but whenever I used windows I intentionally avoided PDF's because the Adobe reader is a huge bloated piece of crap. It would be great for everyone if PDF was integrated into the system like it is on Macs.

What does Microsoft want to do with the PDFs?

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.

Meh.

This doesn't seem particularly interesting, because it's PDF.

However, I've got something I'm developing that may eventually inspire some sort of standard, and I'm also using the .NET "standard", so this is reminding me to just be extra-sure that I don't give MS any way to embrace and extend.

I have your four points right here.

Microsoft's Four Points of Interoperability:

1. Mine.

2. Mine.

3. MINE.

4. MINE!

Aren't we jumping the gun?

All we have is MS preliminary press blitz. We don't know what the sticking point is. PDF is essentially open, but presumably has some usage license.

I can't see a recourse for action unless Microsoft wants to violate that usage license. Perhaps the license precludes Microsofts usual answer to standards (embrace, extend, then envelop).

"Association for Competitive Technology" is also quoted in the article as an unbiased source. But if you check sourcewatch.org you will find they are actually a Microsoft initiated astroturfing group.

Why does the media lap this stuff up?

What's the real story, I wonder?

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) [adobe.com] we see the following:

Adobe will enforce its copyright. Adobe's intention is to maintain the integrity of the Portable Document Format standard. This enables the public to distinguish between the Portable Document Format and other interchange formats for electronic documents. However, Adobe desires to promote the use of the Portable Document Format for information interchange among diverse products and applications. Accordingly, Adobe gives anyone copyright permission, subject to the conditions stated below, to:

• Prepare files whose content conforms to the Portable Document Format
• Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format
• Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays, prints, or otherwise interprets the contents
• Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of data structures and operators, as well as the example code and PostScript language function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the purposes above

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.

Just a DRM question...

Where does DRM and MS's wholesale use of it fall into this argument? Anywhere?
If MS were going to license my format, then bash it up till only MS could really read it with the DRM inside it, that would be monopolistic in my view, and I'd have to say that I agree with Adobe on this if that is the case, or anything even reasonably similar. Its not like MS hasn't done the same in all its other dealings (more or less).

Apple, Open Office and PDF

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.

Market Share

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 Av