Adobe Threatens Microsoft With Suit 362
lseltzer writes "Adobe has threatened an antitrust suit against Microsoft, over PDF writing in Office 2007. Adobe wants Microsoft to separate the feature and charge extra for it. Microsoft has agreed to remove PDF writing, but won't charge extra." From the eWeek article: "In February, Adobe Chief Executive Bruce Chizen told Reuters he considered Microsoft to be the company's biggest concern. 'The competitor I worry about most is Microsoft,' Chizen said at the time. Adobe's PDF technology lets producers create and distribute documents digitally that retain designs, pictures and formatting. "
Yet another misleading summary. (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA (emphasis mine): Adobe hasn't 'threatened' anything. Nowhere in the story is the word 'threat' used.
Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:5, Informative)
What do Adobe think of that?
gimme a break (Score:4, Informative)
for reading i use foxit: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php [foxitsoftware.com]
for saving i make an html page and run it through some pdf generator online (i have to do that maybe twice a year for clients who will only take pdf invoices)
not to mention, isn't "Save As PDF..." built into like every other apple application, and can't pdfs be opened with apple's Preview?
This isn't licensing, it's antitrust. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:5, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:When you whine... (Score:5, Informative)
You are wrong in this instance. They've opened the format for anyone to implemement since it's good for them gaining market share and ubiquity.
Now that Microsoft wants to add PDF support like thousands other 3-rd party PDF writer products out there (including OpenOffice), they're spreading FUD about adobe, rather then just quietly implementing PDF support.
PDF is an open format for anyone to implement.
They can't. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, if you RTFA... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What PDF writer? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:5, Informative)
There is an easier way than Adobe Distiller (Score:5, Informative)
There is an easier way. See PDFCreator. [sourceforge.net] It's a simple printer driver, doesn't take up but a meg or two, installs no toolbars or nag crap. It just makes PDF files.
It's simple, clean, accurate and elegant, IMHO.
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft are developing a competitor to PDF, codenamed 'Metro', that allows all the same functions as PDF as well as being integrated with the Vista printing system (much like Mac OS X's 'Print as PDF'). They also demonstrated it (I think at WinHEC 2005) printing direct to 'Metro-enabled' printers with a noticeable quality boost. They later renamed the format 'XPS' [microsoft.com] and it is present in the current Office 2007 builds.
I think this is typical style Microsoft FUD to make it look like Adobe wants them to drop PDF, when actually, it's MS that wants rid of PDF in order to promote its XPS format. Despite PDF's strong foothold, integration of XPS within the widest used operating system and widest used office suite could change things. I reckon this is MS saying "sorry, not our fault you have to use our format!".
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Informative)
From the article on the web-page:
"Adobe gives copyright permission to anyone to:
- Prepare files in which the file 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 the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a file represented in the Portable Document Format.
- Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as the PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the above purposes."
Therefore.... without expansion of the original article, we really don't know what the issue is. It's possible that Microsoft has extended PDF in some incompatible manner, or that Adobe's more recent innovations, allowing PDF to be edited, aren't being respected, or that someone panicked about The Beast implementing it's own version, and making the original irrelevant.
Basically, we have a smallish company with a few dedicated niches on one side, and a convicted, predatory, behemoth on the other, except that the behemoth looks vulnerable to EU anti-trust hunters. Years ago Jeff Danziger http://www.danzigercartoons.com/ [danzigercartoons.com], an editorial cartoonist, summed up the New IBM with a drawing of a man at a desk, the old IBM THINK logo in the trash, and a new "BUY" logo on the desk. If updated for 2006, and for a generic tech-company, the new logo would read "SUE".
Re:What's sauce for Apple isn't sauce for Microsof (Score:4, Informative)
So I'm guessing that apple took care of the licensing issues far in advance.
Licensing issues? PDF is an approved open standard with perpetual free licensing and patent protection from Adobe. Why would Apple have to take care of anything any more than all the free software projects that re-implemented it?
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. OO.o version 2 can not only generate PDFs, but also generate the table of contents that you sometimes see on the left hand side with PDFs - something which a printer-driver type PDF creator cannot do because by the time it sees the document it knows nothing about its structure.
It's the extra features like this which make people buy Adobe's Acrobat product - many organisations wouldn't install a separate full-blown office suite like OpenOffice, but would happily install a Microsoft office upgrade or Adobe Acrobat. Adobe are quite right to be concerned - past history has shown that "the best on the market" doesn't necessarily translate to "the one which gets picked" - quite often "the one which is good enough and requires minimal additional effort" is the one which gets picked. If Microsoft Office is going on a person's computer anyway, it's likely to to qualify as "good enough" with zero additional effort.
Re:In other news.. (Score:3, Informative)
Not in this case. Adobe is purportedly talking antitrust. Under antitrust laws, actions that are perfectly legal for normal people and companies are nontheless forbidden to monopolies. For example, Linux distros and Apple can bundle any media players they like with their OSes in Europe, but Microsoft was slapped down for doing the exact same thing.
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:3, Informative)
[OfficeLogoMenu] > 'Save As...(arrow next to it)' > 'PDF or XPS'. Guess what? XPS is Metro.
Whoever modded you informative needs a +1 cluebat to the head.
XPS is a better format than PDF for printing (Score:2, Informative)
Data fed to the printer is not a random-acess binary but is in a serial text format. What this means is that while rasters can be generated in parallel, most likely the parsing of the printing language (PostScript for example) can only go serially, hence a bottleneck.
The next step in printing languages will be to have the pages described in a way that will permit parallel interpreting.
One big disadvantage of PDF is that one has to receive the entire file before printing begins -- the index of the pages is at the end of the file. In contrast XPS is designed to explicitely help printer interprers begin to work immediately after page-end marker is received. All data referenced by this page has already been send to the device, intepreting of this page can start immediately and go independently and in parallel with another instance of the interpreter. In this regard XPS is better.
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2, Informative)
No it doesn't. PDFCreator and for that matter and print-to-PDF applications generate vector PDFs, not bitmap PDFs.
ALso, nobody has mentioned that Word Perfect has had export to PDF since at least 2000. There is obviously something fishy about this story. Most likely a combination of poor reporting and MS spin to make sure it will look like Adobe's fault if PDF isn't in vista or the new Office.
Re:XPS is a better format than PDF for printing (Score:3, Informative)
Nonsense. Google for linearized PDF (its in an appendix of the PDF spec).
Re:XPS is a better format than PDF for printing (Score:3, Informative)
I've never heard of a printer that printed PDF directly, but there are very many that can interpret Postscript.
In the world of this industry the best achievers aspire to make the page rendering as multi-threaded as possible.
I doubt anyone cares about that right now. Do you have any reference backing this up at all? Most low end printers even render a single page multiple times because they lack the buffer memory to store the whole page, and the processors are quite slow compared to desktop CPUs (think tens of MHz). A high end printer is one that can store the whole page, and has a decent processor. I don't think they're at the point where they need SMT or multicore processors.
most likely the parsing of the printing language (PostScript for example) can only go serially, hence a bottleneck.
Interpreting is normally the bottleneck. Postscript is extremely easy to parse (by design).
The next step in printing languages will be to have the pages described in a way that will permit parallel interpreting.
Structured Postscript allows you to render different pages in parallel. I don't know why you'd need to go much beyond that anytime soon, at least for printing purposes.
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:3, Informative)
Adobe sues Slashdot for Lying Headlines (Score:3, Informative)
On another topic, unfortunately its probably not possible to sue publications, like the linked one, that routinely print the following phrase (as they do in the linked story): "were not immediately reachable for comment" (emphasis, mine).
Every story that prints that should be forced to replace it with: "You should know, by the way, that I am an ass sucking reporter who couldn't manage to communicate to principle sources for my story, though I may have put in minimal effort to do so (and I reserve the right to define minimal), and I work for an ass sucking publication who's editors don't give a sucked rat's ass, so we're publishing this possibly substanceless collection of blurbs but feel the need to add this line so it sounds like the principle subjects of the story suck even more ass than we do; except worded this way it's clear we suck even more ass than they do, oops (did I use a semicolon? sorry)." Or, just leave the useless and idiotic line out.
Re:Adobe can't have its cake and eat it too (Score:3, Informative)
It's an interesting situation, this one. Although maybe it's just because, for once, the other side is another company who is often seen as overcharging for their software.
But, like other situations, here we have MS wanting to include something that would pretty much make their stranglehold on office software even tighter. And would definitely jeopardise the competition. In this case, Adobe. And in most of those situations I find myself loudly wishing that Miscrosoft would FOAD.
Yet, this time, I find myself on Microsoft's side. Or, more accrately, against Adobe's.
PDF is used a lot these days. For some reason, in education, it seems to be the preferred method of sending an electronic document around. Of course, you then get the scenario where more people want to create PDFs than you have licenses for Acrobat. This happens a lot where I work. The kicker, though, is that they don't need the full PDF-authoring capabilities of Acrobat itself, they only need to convert from Word document to PDF. So definitely not worth shelling out for a copy for every Academic in the department.
Having said all of that, we also do take licensing seriously. So every so often we have to try and figure out who does and doesn't need it installed. And, when someone doesn't need Acrobat, it's often us IT bods who then have to take the file and convert it.
Not too big a deal on the one hand. But, as a user of Open/NeoOffice and also a Mac user, I'm used to being able to print directly to PDF as supported by the software/OS itself. So, to me, it's a complete waste of my time. And every time another Academic wants to convert to a PDF I'm one step closer to suggeting to the IT Manager than OpenOffice becomes a part of the standard build.