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No PDF in Office Could Mean More RIA Clout for Adobe






Topic: Software Development



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  • Looks more like Adobe protecting their revenue streams

    Ryan: Interesting conjecture. I think the driver here is a lot more simple - Occam's Razor applies. Adobe is trying to staunch a potential flood of lost Acrobat revenue. Currently, Acrobat Pro is a big seller (expecially in the corporate market) because it PDF-enables Office. It's the principal reason many organizations (and individuals) buy the Pro package (at a MSRP of $249 per one-off copy - much less in volume I'm sure).

    Whether or not Microsoft ends up shipping their export-to-PDF as a separate download or not, I predict this dust-up will end up hurting Adobe a lot more than MS. There are plenty of alternatives that are free (albeit clumsy) or cheap (and just as easy as Acrobat Pro) to choose from.

    It's often hard to tell what's actually going when you listen to press release speak and legal conjecture. My BS filter and finely tuned olfactory sensors say that MS comes out of this smelling pretty good. Adobe? Not so much.
    • Acrobat Additions

      Thanks for reading morchant. I've always thought that Acrobat Pro did more than just export to PDF. I think there are things like document security, and the ability to publish PDF forms that justified the $250 price tag. That may not be the case, but I always assumed that Acrobat Pro was more value add than just saving PDFs.

      In any case, you're right that this seems like a straight "revenue protection" stance. And that's probably not far from the truth.
      • The Acrobat to be.

        If Adobe is in process of elaborating Acrobat, and not only concerning RIA, then incorporating the most prominent Acrobat feature into Office could reduce sales of the new product.

        Adobe may not want to lose a sales point just when the company is attempting to save and expand a market.
        Anton Philidor
      • Acrobat does do more, but what do average people use it for?

        You're right, Acrobat has a lot more functionality than just saving a simple PDF. But what do average users use Acrobat for? Creating simple PDFs.

        At a summer job several years ago, Marketing had us order copies of Acrobat for many of their staff. All they really used it for was making PDFs that they could post on the Internet (product literature and the like). Nothing that couldn't've been done with some freeware or cheaper third-party Office plugin.

        Many people have been buying full-featured Acrobat for so long when they could've just used other cheaper products. Adobe's gotten a lot of money from this, that they shouldn't've gotten if their customers were a bit smarter. That's what's got them worried--they'd lose this with Office 2007.
        • Good Points

          Anton, PB, both good points. The number of people buying Acrobat to create PDFs on Windows has to be high. And as a percentage of Acrobat sales, it's probably huge. That's a lot of revenue to lose out on.
  • Extend, Embrace, Extinguish

    The PDF standard is open, true enough. According to the accounts I've read, the license on PDF formats is that as long as the output conforms to the specification, then you're in compliance with the open license terms.

    One thing that has not been discussed is the plans that MS has for this format. It would be fairly consistent with previous MS behavior if they would try to "improve" it by adding their own ideas to the format without proper consensus.

    I believe that unspoken story is MS's implementation of the standard and it's lack of compliance to the standard. It's kind of like MS Word, the world's worst HTML editor. I believe that MS is going to botch the job with PDF just like they did with HTML editors built into their Office software.

    I'd be upset with MS if I knew that about them,too.

    Its a format fight, but they're talking about it like it is. Every open source application out there can do it, so why can't MS do it? Heck, even OpenOffice for Windows creates PDFs. Otherwise, I just don't see how Adobe has standing to sue.