Posted on 06/02/2006 9:06:08 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Adobe is poised to sue Microsoft over Microsoft's planned PDF support in Office 2007. Microsoft allegedly is removing the export-to-PDF capability at Adobe's request.
It's not surprising that Adobe Systems is worried about Microsoft's growing encroachments into its core markets. But now Adobe is said to be ready to take its dissatisfaction to the courts.
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 2 that Adobe is poised to launch an antitrust suit in Europe against Microsoft, following the break-down of four-month-long talks over Microsoft's Office 2007 PDF plans.
Microsoft announced in October 2005 that it was building into Office 2007 a PDF export capability, following requests for such a feature by its customers. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is now planning to remove that feature, at the request of Adobe. Adobe also sought to get Microsoft to charge for the export-to-PDF capability, but so far Microsoft is not planning to do so, according to the Journal.
(Excerpt) Read more at microsoft-watch.com ...
For their Photoshop-killer, as bad as Microsoft UIs are, I'll stick with Photoshop. They may get some amateurs with snazzy features, but the pros know workflow is important. As far as Web, please, no more mangling of Web pages by Microsoft products.
Adobe has a rather tight needle to thread. They don't want to prevent people from writing software that writes to PDF, lest some new standard arise and supplant it, but they want theirs to be the one that's easy to use and well-known. Preventing Microsoft from doing the latter without preventing various third-party developers from doing the former could be tricky.
Me either. They'll call it bundling (like Microsoft did with IE to kill Netscape), but it's really just implementing a standard. Sucks for Adobe, but this is what happens with open standards, openness that helped make PDF popular in the first place.
Adobe should lose this case easily, Open Office and Mac uses PDF.. unless Adobe removes support from those programs/systems... MS can use it too.
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