June 8, 2006
Adobe’s crusade against Microsoft is just the first step Apple and Quark are next (Is Adobe shooting itself and all of us in the face?).
The PDF standard in my line of work (publishing/prepress) has for the last 5 years been a God-send. I have been more than a proponent, I’ve been a pundit. When Adobe Acrobat 4 came out clearing up so many of the fatal flaws that Acrobat 3 was all about, I spearheaded a campaign in my corporation to move as much workflow as possible to PDF. I embraced Enfocus as an arsenal, with its software Pitstop, and I decided never again to send out our work in its native application files.
In my eyes Adobe could do no wrong. With Adobe, there were so few problems with final PDF files and if there were problems, these problems could then be cleared up in minutes. This freed up my work life and gave me the time I needed to investigate other technological areas. There was no question, when Acrobat 5 came out that we would upgrade to it. Then Acrobat 6 came out and once more I recommended that we should shell out the dollars for our hundreds of users. Everyone was using PDFs and everyone was using Acrobat. Nothing was more important to Adobe than making sure everyone everywhere could work in PDF format. It was integrated into everything. It was the time of opensource software. It seemed natural to integrate the PDF into software and Adobe implied that as the standard it was fine, like with so many other standards to have PDF capabillities in everything. Then came Acrobat 7.
When Acrobat 7 came out, I pulled out my corporate purchasing card, but before I called my software vendor I stopped to think. “Wait, does everyone really need this?” I shocked even myself with this question. As long as I have Acrobat 7, everyone can mark up this document with Adobe reader. If someone needs to send me a PDF, and they have OS X, or Quark, or Office, or so many other programs, they can create a PDF themselves. Sure, my layout people will need it for final files, but other than that I can shave thousands of dollars off of my software budget now.
So, was I surprised when I saw that Adobe isn’t letting Microsoft use PDFs in the next version of Office? Well, yes actually I was. But I shouldn’t have been. Adobe implied that everyone could embed PDFs and we all fell for it and inferred that it could be used in everything without further licensing. Further, I think Adobe even believed that it was going to let everyone continue to use it; however, when it came down to their plans for Acrobat 8 (which should be coming out towards the later part of this year), they realized that their bottom line was going to drop even more than sales did with Acrobat 7, and they realized that they had to test the waters further.
That is what this Microsoft situation is all about, Adobe putting a toe in the water to test public reaction. If Adobe threatened a small vendor using PDFs, they know the design world would show its fury. But Microsoft, everyone hates the big M. People will laugh and cheer us on. Then we will have precedent and we won’t need to sue the others, we will just send them bills to license the PDF, or they will pull PDF out of their software on their own. We won’t need to make waves and we won’t get blamed by the public.
The companies we love will suffer (big ones like Apple and all the little ones that depend on PDFs). The companies we love to hate will suffer too (Microsoft and Quark). Most of all, though we will suffer, we will lose our gains in efficiency, we will lose our time, we will lose what was a wonderful standard. It sucks, but this is just the beginning.