Microsoft is making changes to the next versions of both Office and Windows as part of an effort to head off a legal challenge from Adobe Systems. Microsoft said earlier Friday that it expects an antitrust suit from Adobe after months of negotiations in which the companies failed to reach an accord. The software maker is unilaterally making changes to both Office 2007 and Windows Vista in an effort to assuage some of Adobe’s concerns. More important, the move is an attempt to lower the chances that an injunction could stop Microsoft from shipping those products.
This is typical of Adobe’s strong-handed tactics. They’d do anything to screw over the consumer as long as it gives them the chance to make a cent.
I don’t typically do things out of spite, but I’m tempted to switch to XPS (which is nicer than PDF anyhow) for that very reason.
Most articles I’ve seen are based on speculation by folks at Microsoft, not based on actual actions by Adobe.
Until Adobe actually *does* something related to this issue, I see no reason to hold them accountable.
Edited 2006-06-04 20:15
Most articles I’ve seen are based on speculation by folks at Microsoft, not based on actual actions by Adobe.
Until Adobe actually *does* something related to this issue, I see no reason to hold them accountable.
Ehhh, huh? Do you suppose MS added ‘save as PDF’ to Office after years of customer request in order to remove it for no reason? The reason Adobe has nothing to say is the same reason every company suddenly clams up – they won’t comment on a pending lawsuit.
Ehhh, huh? Do you suppose MS added ‘save as PDF’ to Office after years of customer request in order to remove it for no reason?
Yes, I think that’s precisely what they’re doing.
What better way to promote their own format (which is a direct competitor to PDF) while making people upset at Adobe at the same time?
It’s a brilliant marketing move.
Except that says Microsoft is removing both XPS and PDF export options by default from Office and making them both downloads.
Oops, there goes your argument.
From the article :
“But computer makers won’t have to include the software that allows users to view XPS files or to save documents as XPS files.
That said, Microsoft doesn’t expect many computer makers will choose that option. ”
Please, it looks like Windows ME to me…
My argument is still here.
Not really. Since nobody cares about XPS yet, it doesn’t hurt MS in the least to pull it, and it provides a very convenient smokescreen. My argument is still quite intact.
But how does that promote XPS?
Sheesh, you’re just not getting it today.
Whats this got to do with the consumer? They are simply defending their sales.
“Whats this got to do with the consumer? They are simply defending their sales.”
Generally, the two (sales and consumers) are symbiotically connected. I don’t really see why Adobe is making such a big deal about this. PDF is an open standard which would imply that it would be open for others, even Adobe’s competition, to use.
PDF is an open standard which would imply that it would be open for others, even Adobe’s competition, to use.
If PDF is open standard, then how come Adobe wants to take MS to court?
The same way Linux is open but Linus Torvalds and the non-profit organization ‘Linux International’ can sue you .
To be ‘Open’ doesn’t mean to be an ‘Anarchy’. There are always rules against misuse.
The problem with Microsoft is that they don’t want to dominate by making the best apps, they just want to dominate by force, creating new closed formats and setting them as default on every windows instalation. (WMP, WMA, WMV, WIMP, IE, XPS, ActiveX, …)
Edited 2006-06-04 20:15
What does that have to do with this?
To be ‘Open’ doesn’t mean to be an ‘Anarchy’. There are always rules against misuse.
And in this case, where do you see misuse?
The problem with Microsoft is that they don’t want to dominate by making the best apps, they just want to dominate by force, creating new closed formats and setting them as default on every windows instalation. (WMP, WMA, WMV, WIMP, IE, XPS, ActiveX, …)
Strange that you see problem here with Microsoft and not with Adobe. Shouldn’t that read: “The problem with ADOBE is that they don’t want to dominate by making the best apps..”
Once, again, where do you see “misuse” of PDF by having “Export to PDF” in MS Office?
Looks like “Export to PDF” is free for anyone except Microsoft. How does that make any sense?
“If PDF is open standard, then how come Adobe wants to take MS to court?”
Because Adobe makes tons of money from selling Acrobat.
“If PDF is open standard, then how come Adobe wants to take MS to court?”
Exactly my point.
For reference:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
I’m not the one who originally claimed that PDF was an open standard. Adobe was.
I think that Microsoft should have insisted on its freedom to innovate and not removed the PDF and XPS export features from Microsoft Office. PDF export is a good feature and is something that the customers want.
Since only Windows Vista / Office 2007 users can use XPS, I don’t see this being good for consumers.
Since only Windows Vista / Office 2007 users can use XPS, I don’t see this being good for consumers
Untrue. Windows 2000, 2003, XP can use as well. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx . As people here are often fond of saying, competition and choice are always good. Why is PDF being exclusive better for consumers?
PDF is far better for consumers because it is cross-platform interoperable. XPS is not.
Microsoft don’t do interoperability. In fact they consistently do the exact opposite: lock-in.
ummm.. Isn’t this about microsoft trying to support somethign that is cross-platform(PDF) but then not being able to do it out of fear of legal issues?
Windows yes, but Linux and OSX – no.
Anyhow, I doubt that PDF is going to be owned by this MS proprietary format. I don’t see mp3 being owned by wma either. People with real usage for this this will be those idiots which currently only know how to e-mail a doc file.
With a PDF export in MSOffice there would at least be a chance that they find out about exporting PDF which anyone can read (yes, DOC is supported by OpenOffice, but still not perfectly).
Windows yes, but Linux and OSX – no.
Not true. XPS is a cross-platform spec and will be available in hardware such as printers and scanners, and mobile devices, and non-MS OSes such as *x and MacOS X. MS and ISVs are providing viewers for Windows, MacOS X, and *x.
http://blogs.msdn.com/andy_simonds/archive/2005/10/31/487487.aspx
Everyone says judge Jackson was overly harsh when he decided to split MS up into 2 companies, but I say they would have been better off.
Face it, MS has notepad, solitaire, calc, and paint. ANY other application they decide to include with it is going to land them back in court under someone else’s antitrust claims.
As it stands today they are basically legally forced to stagnate.
personal attacks/offensive language? no
spam or includes advertisements? – no
off-topic? – not really
I disagree with this user/opinion – ding ding ding, we have a winner.
Someone please remove the mod points form the individual that moderated this comment down.
Does Notepad save to a filetype that no one else can open?*
Does Solitaire introduce new proprietary rules that undermine the success of other forms of Solitaire?
Does calc have MS-owned math functions in it that you can’t use unless you buy their product?**
Is Paint integrated into the kernel?
They don’t get in trouble for bundling. They get in trouble for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and_extinguish
* It does have that newline token no one else uses.
** This one’s possible; Microsoft does own a patent on a Boolean function (xor, I believe)
Adobe Has Done Nothing!!!!!!
This is just microsoft using FUD to push XPS. Nothing more, nothing less. Adobe’s lawyers may have told something to the MS guys but there’s no public statement from Adobe yet
Adobe does not need to do anything. This is another stalling method that Microsoft is using to soften the blow to customers that Vista/Office “might” be delayed a little longer than expected….
Also, it is a play for the “sympathetic, loyalism” vote, whereby, Microsoft expects customers to feel they are being harranged by Adobe and the courts, and the only way you can help them is to dump PDF and use Microsofts CLOSED format.
This is another stalling method that Microsoft is using to soften the blow to customers that Vista/Office “might” be delayed a little longer than expected
I am using Office 2007 Beta 2 right now (so can you, it’s a public download). It has Save to PDF right now – all they have to do is remove the code; removing is a lot faster than adding. Explain more how this is a smokescreen for a delayed Office release?
Microsoft expects customers to feel they are being harranged by Adobe and the courts, and the only way you can help them is to dump PDF and use Microsofts CLOSED format.
Except that XPS is not a closed format. It is open and royalty-free. Apparently unlike Adobe’s PDF turned out to be…
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/downloads.mspx
//Except that XPS is not a closed format. It is open and royalty-free.//
XPS is undoubtedly dependent on other features of Windows (such as AciveX). It is therefore not open – it almost definately can’t be implemented on a non-windows platform and so it is not open but rather yet another attempt at lock-in to the Windows platform.
Office Open XML is definately like this – it can only be implemented to run on a Windows platform.
Undoubtedly… almost definitely. Of course.
People like you piss me off royally because you undoubtedly never looked at the text of the specification (almost definitely, you’ll claim that you don’t want to download this spec due to its packaging as a doc file in an exe).
This is yet another attempt by an OSS user to feel like he is contributing to the movement although he is doing nothing to further its cause.
You can do good things for OSS if you program good stuff–perhaps an XPS viewer for unix. It is a very long and detailed spec, but it is all XML, so you won’t actually need to implement a parser to read the document. You just need to implement the semantics of the tags, which seem to be spelled out in pretty good detail. You definitely don’t need to write any Activex code (why would you need this in a format that is meant to mimic stationary print?).
If you can’t do this, then just correct people’s misconceptions about OSS if they claim it can’t do something it can. Or make reasoned arguments against other systems rather than this FUD you’re spewing (your text is nothing if not Fearful, Uncertain, and Doubt-ridden). Open XML is definitely like this? I haven’t seen the spec yet and I doubt you have either.
If you went to the site and read the “fine” license, you would have noticed something that reads:
“1. You may review these Materials only (a) as a reference to assist You in planning and designing Your product, service or technology (“Product”) to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology (“Microsoft Product”) as described in these Materials;”
That, if I read correctly, means that I can only code something with those specs if it’s made to work in a Microsoft product. All I can say is; no thank you.
“1. You may review these Materials only (a) as a reference to assist You in planning and designing Your product, service or technology (“Product”) to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology (“Microsoft Product”) as described in these Materials;”
That, if I read correctly, means that I can only code something with those specs if it’s made to work in a Microsoft product. All I can say is; no thank you.
If you follow the spec in implementing a conformant XPS document viewer on a non-MS platform, you are still building a product “to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology” because your viewer reads XPS documents which are an MS technology. The same applies if you use the spec to make an app that outputs XPS.
Did you just suddenly block everything out of your mind when you read the “specification, service or technology” part?
Seriously, how could you single out “product” but miss the other three and/or miss that the conjunction used was “OR”.
Then we need someone to read the spec and write third party specification document. IF MS wants to sue that person, it’s their problem. Then linux folks can use that documentation and write XPS implementation.
No it means you have to use the doc to “interface with a Microsoft…specification” which, in this case, IS XPS. Basically, they don’t want you reading the specs and docs for XPS and designing your own format.
You can do good things for OSS if you program good stuff–perhaps an XPS viewer for unix. It is a very long and detailed spec, but it is all XML, so you won’t actually need to implement a parser to read the document. You just need to implement the semantics of the tags, which seem to be spelled out in pretty good detail. You definitely don’t need to write any Activex code (why would you need this in a format that is meant to mimic stationary print?).
If you can’t do this, then just correct people’s misconceptions about OSS if they claim it can’t do something it can. Or make reasoned arguments against other systems rather than this FUD you’re spewing (your text is nothing if not Fearful, Uncertain, and Doubt-ridden). Open XML is definitely like this? I haven’t seen the spec yet and I doubt you have either.
I agree that if the XPS standard is free and open, the OSS community should evaluate it on it’s merits rather than saying “OMG! Microsoft! Stay away!”
I’ve read the licensing and some of the documentation on XPS, and while I don’t think an OSS implementation could be GPL-compatible, that doesn’t preclude it’s use by the community.
But there are other elements of the spec, such as WMP, that may cause problems and MS hasn’t specified licensing yet for their new imaging format. If licensing is required, then that would preclude XPS from being an open license.
Open XML is in a similar position, sure the spec has been published and other than some binary ugliness should be implementable as any other XML spec, but MS has not offered any licensing or patent indemnity (yet) that would make this viable for the OSS community.
Just because a spec is open and documented doesn’t mean it can be implemented by OSS projects, hence the community’s apprehension. And while Adobe is little better than Microsoft, at least PDF is an openly available, free-to-use spec that the community is able to support themselves (and have) in the absence of sanctioned vendor recognition.
But I agree people shouldn’t crap on Microsoft’s efforts (yet), and should at least wait and see where they’re going with it. If MS and Adobe want to get into a pissing contest over who’s standard is more open and accessible, then the community and even commercial customers will likely be the winners.
Just my 2c.
I’ve read the licensing and some of the documentation on XPS, and while I don’t think an OSS implementation could be GPL-compatible, that doesn’t preclude it’s use by the community.
There shouldn’t be anything in the license to preclude GPL compatibility. The only requirement of the license I recall is placing a notice in your source code that MS may have IP claims on the technology used.
But there are other elements of the spec, such as WM P, that may cause problems and MS hasn’t specified licensing yet for their new imaging format. If licensing is required, then that would preclude XPS from being an open license.
WM P is part of the XPS spec and is supposed to follow the terms of the XPS license. There’s an email address on the XPS site where you can request more info and a porting kit for WM P.
Open XML is in a similar position, sure the spec has been published and other than some binary ugliness should be implementable as any other XML spec, but MS has not offered any licensing or patent indemnity (yet) that would make this viable for the OSS community.
Open XML (once finalized) will follow the same license as the current Office 2003 XML formats, which is the CNS. Gnumeric already has an implementation of an OXML improt filter.
CNS
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/covenant.mspx
Latest ECMA Draft Spec:
http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_current_work/TC45-2006-…
OpenXMLDeveloper.org
http://openxmldeveloper.org/
I don’t get it…
Apple uses PDF all over the place in OS X. Why can’t Microsoft?
There are free PDF readers & writers available everywhere.
What am I missing?
What am I missing?
Document Control
Sure everyone uses PDF. But the only full featured PDF creator and manipulater is Adobe Acrobat Pro.
With PDF support in Office, MS threatens Adobe’s document control.
Yes, but what would Microsoft’s “Export to PDF” offer over Apple’s “Export to PDF” ? Surely they would be almost exactly the same? As far as I am aware, Microsoft weren’t going to offer any later editing of PDF documents.
But really, it is very hard to understand what the hell is going on here. Is it:
A.
Microsoft are claiming they might be sued so that they don’t have to put the feature in and can use their closed thing.
Bad Microsoft!
OR
B.
Adobe are actually wanting to stop Microsoft from doing this in order to protect their bottom line. They are plenty of other people doing the same thing already.
Bad Adobe!
off topic but:
“full featured”
hehe…like how there isn’t even a “search/replace” function for text…
Edited 2006-06-04 20:27
“There are free PDF readers & writers available everywhere.”
Unfortunately, this is only partially true. Adobe has yet to release a more recent version of their PDF reader for Solaris x86 than version 4. The problem with this is that we need a more recent PDF reader to open any PDFs created with Adobe’s PDF security or other new “features”. For some reason, Adobe can make a Solaris SPARC release of their PDF reader but refuses to for x86.
For this reason alone, and unless Adobe changes their position here, I would much rather see the portable open document format standard start to become the defacto instead of PDF.
Where are official statements of press releases from Microsoft or Adobe?
This is starting to get ridiculous. Blogs and “news” sites (microsoft watch, not here) are reporting every little move a company makes, even if it’s a rumor because someone misheard something or something a person from one company says off the record in jest, or soemthing simply taken out of context.
I for one am getting tired of all the uproar made of things before all the details are known and official stances are known.
Blogs and “news” sites (microsoft watch, not here) are reporting every little move a company makes
Well actually it’s part of having a free press that gets the information they don’t want to tell us. If we have to rely on official statements from corporations (and the government) alone, we would never know what’s really going on. There’s a fine line between simple blog and new sources theses. Would it be different if some major newspaper said, “Souces inside Microsoft indicate that..”?
.
Edited 2006-06-04 21:27
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNew…
“It seems (Adobe’s) new position is that the PDF standard is now open to for some to implement, but not all,” said Jonathan Zuck, president for the Association for Competitive Technology.
Naive people seem to think that because they find Microsoft bad, everyone else must be good. Having that sort of illogic is going to require a lot of painful life lessons to unlearn. Adobe is wrong here – tiresome, hypocritical, and wrong. No one here has come up with a defense of them other than ‘I hate microsoft’ – and no one will.
Fwwooo… end ranting.
Association for Competitive Technology is financed by Microsoft.
Again, who’s bad ?
All I see is Microsoft spreading FUD on an open standard to develop their own, closed format, XPS.
Cheers..
Yeah… uh… its not closed.
Despite miniscule prospects of running Office any time soon (running LInux and all) I really, really want MS to kick Abobe’s hiny hard for inflicting the pain of “read only” PDF’s on consumers for so long.
I have stored more than 4 years of PDF forms printed just beacuse I couldn’t save them. Every time I get a PDF for signing, I cringe… I’d rather have a Word file sent, to which I can easily paste an immage of my signature and email back.
Abobe’s net contribution to the betterment of computer kind – zero. My idea of PDF – free crack.
Hopefully, MS will tighten their undies a bit.
Edited 2006-06-05 00:03
Try this new version for running Office on Linux:
http://www.win4lin.com/content/view/64/125/
According to the blurb that should do the trick.
PS: you don’t want XPS to win out. XPS is proprietary and it is NOT cross-platform interoperable. For that matter, so is Office Open XML – it too is not cross-platform interoperable. For that reason IMHO neither can ever be a standard.
If we think of standards like ‘RTF’, ‘HTML’, and ‘XML’ and what MS has done with them, I think we will be thanking Adobe for the work they are doing. MS needs a slap down, and since the Justice Department doesn’t seem to have the cajones to enforce court rulings, it is up to companies like Adobe. 3 Cheers!
Wait, what?
RTF was developed by MS, was it not?
What did MS do to XML?
Apparently he thinks that Office XML format is somehow breaking XML…
Don’t worry about it, he’s just ignorant. RTF was indeed developed by MS. Most people seem to ignore that aspect.
Microsoft’s XML format isn’t breaking XML; it’s just a bad implementation when compared to ODF, at least in the opinion of some people.
Supporting articles:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051020193905892
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125144611543
Bad implementation of what, XML? How the hell can you have a bad implemtation of XML for something like this? A bad implementation is to use XML when it serves no purpose or using it improperly. Neither is the case for Open XML.
MS has done nothing to XML except use it and helped it to become adopted across the industry.
Did you not notice that when you release PDF specifications into the wild, you *can’t* control it?
Did you not notice that most of Microsoft Office’s competitors, Corel’s WordPerfect and Sun’s StarOffice (and its closely related OpenOffice.org) not only support PDF exporting, but tout it? Do you seriously think Microsoft would give its competitors a continued feature upperhand?
Did you not notice that one of Windows’ major competitors have been touting its PDF capabilities (Mac OS X) for well over half a decade? Did you not notice, also, that most Linux distributions comes with various PDF implementations out of the box? Why shouldn’t Windows itself?
Just because you want to sell Adobe Acrobat Professional/Standard/Elements? Do you know most consumers and a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses *can’t* afford Acrobat Professional, and most just want to export or print in PDF, and none of those fancy Acrobat features few use? Isn’t it uncompetitive for you to be forcing Microsoft not to do what its competitors are doing?
And while on the point of Acrobat, did you know all Reader and Professional/Standard/Elements editions are immensely slow and somewhat buggy, and in addition to that sometimes fail to integrate properly with IE and Firefox after updates? It is annoying that you think that Windows users MUST NOT enjoy the same benefit Mac users have been enjoying since 2000, just so that you can still sell an otherwise marketless and pointless product.
Real competition often push competitors out of the market, it’s called creative destruction. Learn to deal with it, not force customers to deal with your $449 (Pro) or $299 (Standard) pricetag. (Elements is large-subscription only)
On the basis that PDF is an ‘open’ format, it does all seem very curious, although, as we have seen with many open source implementations of PDF, it takes a while to get it fully sorted out.
I imagine Adobe are panicking that MS will attempt to proprietise PDF (as with Java) partly breaking it in the process, so as to give the advantage to their own format, and Adobe are withdrawing it to attempt to prevent this.
Was the Office implementation written with Adobe’s assistance? If so then Adobe will feel entitled to some recompense, if not they will worry about the nature of the implementation (as above).
And why now? At this late stage? Has adobe found out something recently about MS plans?
We’ll probably never know, but meanwhile two giants (one giant giant and one smaller giant) of the overpriced software industry seem to be squaring up for a battle that at the end of the day will probably do neither of them much good.
Well, I don’t care whether XPS is Open or not under your definitions. Only when it is released such that GPLed applications can interface with it FLAWLESSLY will it matter.
In that case, PDF is a much better system as other implementations are available. Openoffice can export to PDF, and kpdf/(insert new gnome pdf viewer) can read them just fine. And PDF has a large backing. That is what matters.
If not, lets just all export to DVI (default output of TeX) since its not only open, but is just about as usable as anything (even more open than PDF).
Really. There are just some instances where more options are not increasing consumer power. XPS is one of them. Its not like its output will be anywhere better than other formats, or will have distinguishing features that can justify as ADOPTING it. Please give us the power to choose whether we want it. Don’t bundle it to windowsTM.