Tuesday, June 06, 2006

 

Dumb move, Adobe


Maybe you've heard about this, but in a singularly illogical move, Adobe has crashed talks with Microsoft about including the Save as PDF option in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. This is really upsetting to me--when Microsoft makes a great move toward open collaboration, Adobe squelches the deal (for what? greed? power? because they can?) and asks Microsoft to not only remove the Save as PDF option but to also take out Microsoft's own portable document format, XPS (which saves finished files in an XML-based portable format). And, reaching beyond Office 2007, they want XPS out of Windows Vista, too! Unbelievable.

Brian Jones, Office PM and XML expert, writes about this in more detail on his blog. But this Washington Post article really speaks my mind about the whole issue. It just makes no sense. It's heavy-handed and self-serving. And it clearly says--at least to me--that Adobe is more interested in its own bottom-line (or future strategic efforts) than it is in best serving a worldwide community of users who would greatly benefit from having a PDF option built into the world's most widely used application software.

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