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Software Microsoft Promotes Office 2007 Add-Ons
Brandon Hill (Blog) - September 8, 2006 10:55 AM
Print E-mail del.icio.us 22 comment(s) - last by mindless1.. on Sep 11 at 9:15 PM
Microsoft posts "Save to PDF" add-ons

DailyTech reported back in June that Adobe wasn't too happy with Microsoft's inclusion of native "Save to PDF" functionality in Office 2007. Microsoft and Adobe spent months in mediation over the feature and in the end, Microsoft chose to remove the feature. Microsoft even agreed to pull native support for its own XPS file format. From Information Week:

Some analysts speculated that Microsoft's surrender -- unusual for the Redmond, Wash. developer -- was driven by worries of possible antitrust action by the federal government if Microsoft moved on Adobe's turf. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is a Microsoft creation intended to compete with PDF in the electronic document market.

As a consolation for consumers looking forward to native "Save to PDF" functionality, Microsoft did state that it would make add-ons available for Office 2007 that would support PDF and XPS file formats. The Redmond-based company has made good on that promise and three new Office 2007 add-ons are available from Microsoft's Download Center:

In other Office 2007 news, there is word that Microsoft is set to release the Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh shortly.

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What Was The Problem?
By kelmon on 9/8/2006 11:49:17 AM , Rating: 2
What I never understood about all this is that the Mac OS X uses PDF a lot for displaying, exporting and printing documents, so what was the problem with Microsoft including it in Office 2007? Does Adobe trust Apple more or did Apple pay a license fee to Adobe in the past? I'd have thought that including a "Save As PDF" function in Office would only increase the use of PDF rather than cause problems and therefore have been good for Adobe, particularly as they evidentially don't have a problem with it being added later for free.




RE: What Was The Problem?
By Motley on 9/8/2006 11:54:28 AM , Rating: 2
Apple using PDF everywhere (with apples 4% marketshare)helps spread it's use and makes it more likely to force everyone else to have atleast a PDF reader. Microsoft using PDF (with Microsoft's 95% marketshare) would crush Adobes PDF reader/writer.


RE: What Was The Problem?
By retrospooty on 9/8/2006 12:13:08 PM , Rating: 2
exactly... Apple is a non-contender when you look at it from a business perspective.

I am all for MS creating a new and better format that we can all use. PDF pisses me off... $500+ for Adobe acrobat writer is just rediculous. Its not even that great of a format.


RE: What Was The Problem?
By Jetster on 9/8/2006 12:19:38 PM , Rating: 3
Even the free adobe reader is a over-bloated piece of crap, for a simple file reader, it sure is bloated and resource hungry. If MS software can read pdf, nobody will ever touch adode sht. oh, well, there is always foxit reader...


RE: What Was The Problem?
By Bonrock on 9/8/2006 12:46:07 PM , Rating: 2
Just to clarify, Office 2007 cannot read PDFs, it can only write them. Microsoft is not trying to compete with Adobe in the PDF editor market; they're just adding the ability to output to PDF, which is a feature many people have asked for.

That's why I think Adobe's behavior is particularly lame. Microsoft isn't muscling in on their professional market, but it seems Adobe wants to try and force people who casually export to PDF once in a while to pay $500 for their software.


RE: What Was The Problem?
By mgambrell on 9/8/2006 12:50:43 PM , Rating: 2
Maybe casual once in a while pdf exporters constitute the majority of acrobat's business?


RE: What Was The Problem?
By TomZ on 9/8/2006 1:16:12 PM , Rating: 2
Probably true. There are 400 million Office users worldwide - that is a huge potential market for Adobe.


RE: What Was The Problem?
By Lifted on 9/8/2006 1:28:09 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Maybe casual once in a while pdf exporters constitute the majority of acrobat's business?


That's probably correct, and I'm sure those people would be just as happy with one of the many much cheaper or even free pdf creation tools out there. The few tools that Acrobat has that other apps don't are probably not needed by 95% of the people who use Acrobat and are therefore not worth the 1000% higher price that Adobe charges.


RE: What Was The Problem?
By rushfan2006 on 9/8/2006 4:51:04 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Just to clarify, Office 2007 cannot read PDFs, it can only write them. Microsoft is not trying to compete with Adobe in the PDF editor market; they're just adding the ability to output to PDF, which is a feature many people have asked for.


And just to clarify for you...early on in Office 07's development the original plan was in fact to have PDF writing and reading capability built it. Adobe, as you could have guessed got wind of this and prepared to take Microsoft to court unless they paid HEFTY license fees/royalties to Adobe for this full fledge PDF functionality.

The add-on's you are reading about in this Daily Tech article is the end result of Microsoft's decision to step away from full fledge PDF support integrated into Office 07 because they basically don't want to pay Adobe huge fees or get sued.



RE: What Was The Problem?
By TomZ on 9/8/2006 4:58:55 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
And just to clarify for you...early on in Office 07's development the original plan was in fact to have PDF writing and reading capability built it.

In the original announcement where Microsoft said they were incorporating PDF support for Office, there is no mention of being able to read PDFs:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/10/...

I'm not saying you're wrong (I don't know for sure), but I haven't read this anywhere prior to your post.

Also, IMO reading PDFs doesn't make a lot of sense, since there is a lot of source information that is lost when you publish a document to a printable form like PDF. I therefore can't imagine important use cases for Office being able to read PDFs in the first place.


RE: What Was The Problem?
By MrDiSante on 9/8/06, Rating: 0
RE: What Was The Problem?
By lemonadesoda on 9/10/2006 7:01:51 AM , Rating: 2
Does anyone have the same problem as me with PDF reader in iExplorer? Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. The only way to "fix" it is to TaskManager and kill the Adobe0000cleanup.exe process that has clearly got its cleanup knickers in a twist!


RE: What Was The Problem?
By rmaharaj on 9/10/2006 7:22:58 PM , Rating: 2
It's strange that you should say that. Adobe Reader runs just fine (i.e. no more laggy than any other program) on a 450MHz P3 w/256MB RAM I have kicking around running FC5. Maybe it's like RealPlayer - they skipped some of the crap for the Linux version.


Why another format?
By santa590 on 9/8/2006 11:37:28 AM , Rating: 2
I haven't been up to date, but why another format? Why not improve pdf instead of introducing another? Is this another MS trying to take over to have it's own format to be the standard?

If it operates better than pdf, I'm not totally against it, but we'll probably have to install new software, which will probably have incompatibility problems, bugs, etc.




RE: Why another format?
By Motley on 9/8/2006 12:06:01 PM , Rating: 3
There are a lot of reasons.

PDF doesn't do nearly everything office would require of it, so they would have to add a ton of things to it just to make it work for the features they had in the older office suites.

Standardizing on PDF would mean slower development for new office versions. It would require MS to "apply" for a PDF feature addition, and wait to see if the PDF group will incorporate it. What if they say no? That's a pretty bad spot to be in when Office is MS's biggest money maker.

Because MS would have to get any new office features incorporated into the PDF spec, it would require them to disclose far in advance what features/functionality they are planning on incorporating into the next version of Office. This would tip off competition on what direction the are headed, and close the gap significantly between Microsoft implementing a feature and competitors implementing a similiar feature.

Royalties. Adobe charges for the use of PDF -- er, they want to charge Microsoft for the use of PDF. Apparently everyone else can use it for free though.


RE: Why another format?
By TomZ on 9/8/2006 1:08:39 PM , Rating: 2
In addition to what the above poster noted, why is Adobe's proprietary PDF standard any better than a proprietary standard developed by Microsoft?

Also, just because Adobe came up with something doesn't mean we have to guarantee their monopoly for that format by discouraging development or use of other formats.

I personally would prefer to see several competing formats available from different companies and open-source groups - this is the best way to drive innovation. You can clearly see the lack of innovation and progression in PDF over the years.


RE: Why another format?
By ZeeStorm on 9/8/2006 1:27:16 PM , Rating: 1
Hmm, as I recall, Microsoft has always been the monopoly with the document standards. How many different kinds of Word files are there.. about 35? So they go and make another. Why? To stay away from compatibility with open-source technology. They don't want to promote Open Office's support for M$ standards. And seeing as PDF is now similar Open Source, they have no reason to support it. M$ is going to make you use what they want you to, and if requires squishing the open source standards and making their own, then by all means they can do it. Look at what they did to the web by making their own "standards", they just about killed it. However, I'm not surprised by their actions, they will not promote open source software or standards ever, especially when the company has a very competitive stance to M$. IE7 is probably the most standards-compliant thing M$ has ever made, and it still lacks by a large degree.

So all-in-all, this is a typical M$ action.


RE: Why another format?
By TomZ on 9/8/2006 1:31:33 PM , Rating: 2
I think you're confused - XPS is not a document save format like DOC - it is a formatted-document standard that competes to a certain extent with PDF, except that it has/will have native support in some printers.

Anyway, I don't see any explanation on your part as to why we should allow Adobe to have a monopoly in the PDF-like file format market, and to act in the same way that you claim that Microsoft does. So, Microsoft is bad for doing that, but it's okay if Adobe does the same?


RE: Why another format?
By mindless1 on 9/11/2006 9:15:12 PM , Rating: 2
Why not improve PDF- yes, we'd like that, but Adobe keeps making it even worse!

Why another format- this news post is an example of Adobe's desire to limit PDF creation to those paying ridiculous sums. In the document sharing world, Adobe has a monopoly in the particular niche their PDF format sits. We need competition against it, since Adobe is such a bunch of asses that they won't even allow users to disable things like "don't show this message popup again" prompt, essentially forcing anyone receiving documents created with newer versions of Acrobat to tolerate it or install the evermore bloated versions.

Yes we'll have to install new software, and I don't want 80 gazillion document exchange formats as it kinda defeats the purpose, but unfortunately Adobe is not looking out for the best interests of recipients of their document format, let alone customers.

While changing to a new format will be a temporary inconvenience, it looks as though it will have to happen before Adobe wakes up.


It's comments like these...
By johnnyMon on 9/8/2006 12:12:07 PM , Rating: 2
...that keep me reading this site. Thanks for everyone's good questions and insightful answers.