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. "
So (Score:3, Interesting)
Or ps2pdf?
Whats the point of opening the spec for PDF, if you don't want other people's applications to be able to write them?
I used the PDF export in Office 2007 Beta 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Its integrated, its almost as quick as saving the file, and most of all, it doesn't require 300megs of crappy Adobe junk to be installed which hogs your system, installs a printer driver, and adds its toolbars to every fucking application.
I hope microsoft does NOT remove PDF export functionality, because the alternative (adobe acrobat) is annoying and bloated. Sure, it might have OCR and some other niceties, but it should stick to that, instead of trying to take over every document publishing app on my PC.
So why isn't Adobe expected to sue Apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't sue people who don't have money. Why go after some shlub?
Note: The above statement does not apply to creatures and other entitites that have eruptedd out of the orifices of the devil such as the RIAA and the MPAA.
I don't understand why people still are using PDF (Score:3, Interesting)
Software Dictatorship (Score:4, Interesting)
It is because techies have such poor social skills. They talk of libertarian ideals but in reality are mostly doormats who feel safer with a monolithic dictator. Nerds sadly trade proper ownership for the false substitute of being controlled by surrogate big daddy.
Adobe software is fighting a losing battle in a totalitarian industry where the tech worker attitude enables tyranny.
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:3, Interesting)
One is that some subset of distiller is in Microsoft Word under an agreement with Adobe. If you install Adobe Acrobat (not the reader, the full version), it adds a subset of distiller to Word.
There is a LOT of business out there that converts Word documents to PDF. Adobe makes a lot of money from it, and Microsoft is speculating that when they add PDF capabilities to Word for no extra charge, that this market will be quashed and Adobe will lose money.
Kinda like when Microsoft gave away IE while Netscape was charging for their browser. Killed the browser market, killed Netscape.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:2, Interesting)
openoffice has pdf export - no money - no lawsuit.
we have programmale format objects for xml in several
programming languages which can make pdf's with xml/xslt
but again - no money - no lawsuit.
kde can print into pdf (i think it may use ps2pdf internally)
but no money here neither so no lawsuit.
this is the very same reason why bittorrent's author
is not in the court of law yet neither. he doesn't make
a penny from the file sharing going on here, so he
won't be sued. but the site runners that make money
from banners, they get a highway to their lawyers, cause
they have $$$.
it's 2006, nobody sues for justice, it's just about the money.
Clearly FUD (Score:3, Interesting)
The proof? Adobe is shipping a product (MacroMedia's Cold Fusion Server) with my F/OSS library iText [lowagie.com] to produce PDF from Cold Fusion pages. I never heard anybody at Adobe complain because I wrote a free PDF engine.
As a PDF specialist I know that the big money isn't in the conversion from Word to PDF. PDF is a lot more than text documents. The Acrobat product family is used for completely different reasons than a product like MS Word or a free library like iText.
Wire news * (Score:1, Interesting)
more interesting would be, say, some insight from the author as to whether adobe has gone after open source software that produces pdf files, or online pdf generators, not speculation that there might be a lawsuit. articles that report fact are always better than ones that do not.
Re:What's the Correct One? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why do you say that? All I could see in the article was: Representatives of Microsoft and Adobe were not immediately reachable for comment. - that's not refusing to comment.
Now, I suspect the reason Microsoft & Adobe have been negotiating, is over rights to use Adobes proprietary DRM extensions (the ones that are not implemeneted by openoffice, Apple's print to PDF feature, etc).
When negotiations broke down (who knows what reason for, perhaps Adobe was trying to screw MS or vice versa), MS was left without being able to fully support PDF.
There's no reasonable reading of the story that doesn't include an Adobe threat of legal action.
You haven't been following Microsoft stories for long have you?
Re:Playing Devil's Advocate here (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, on the bundling front, it wasn't really so much that MS was bundling IE with windows that got them a guilty verdict, as it was MS banning OEMs from also including Netscape (or any other software not approved by MS, see BeOS attempting to get installed as a bootloader option around the same time). Of course, they had other crimes too, such as intentionally providing competitors with incomplete/incorrect APIs.
Re:Well, if you RTFA... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not? Since when does having a monopoly mean that you can't give things away free?
MS has a monopoly on their OS. Thus, they are not under normal market pressure for the price of the OS. They can, theoretically, raise the price $10 with little or no effect upon sales, to whatever the maximum amount of income will be, regardless of any competition. Why does this matter? It matters because nothing is truly free. It costs money to purify, bottle and ship water. Thus by "giving it away for free" what they are really doing is including the cost of it in the cost of Windows. When you buy Windows, you are then paying for bottled water, whether you want it or not, just as you are paying for the development of IE, Windows media player, etc., whether you want it or not.
What they can't do is use their monopoly in one area to kill their competition in another area. Since Microsoft is not in the "water selling" business they aren't killing the competition by giving away water for free with their OS.
There is a market for water. By bundling water with their OS and paying for the cost of this operation with it, they are entering into the water market, and no one can compete against them because even if it costs them twice as much to bottle and it tastes a little off, people still buy it because they need an OS, and they have no choice after that.
What Microsoft is doing here is adding some basic functionality to it's[sic] office suite.
Actually, they have created both a PDF generation and a generator for a new competitor to PDF (an MS proprietary format) and built it into the OS.
This is functionality that all or most of its competitors in the office market already have. So by adding it, Microsoft is just keeping up with its own competitors.
This matters not at all. OS X has built in PDF generation, but Apple does not have a monopoly on OS's. You can only bypass the market forces and the advantages of capitalism if you have a monopoly. Apple is getting close to having one on portable mp3 players and could get in trouble for bundling PDF generation software with that, but they don't so they are not at risk.
That is a legal action, even if you are a monopoly.
It is probably legal for them to bundle PDF or a competitor to PDF generation with office, but not with their OS or browser. Even this, however, is somewhat iffy as the office suite is illegally tied to the OS, via bundled support for the proprietary .doc format.
I totally disagree... (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides, until the abismal HTML format is replaced with something a capable as PDF, we'll be reading PDFs.