Adobe Planning Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft?

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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.

Microsoft said last fall that Office 2007 would be able to output PDF documents compatible with any PDF viewer that supports version 1.4 of the public Adobe PDF specification. Office 2007 PDF documents were expected to be accessible to screen readers, the company said. Microsoft SharePoint-related products also were set to be able to index PDF documents for use in enterprise content management scenarios, Microsoft added.

View: Microsoft-Watch

#1 gohankid77 on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:05

Just when you think M$ is doing something good for its customers, they get stopped by another company that complains about M$ using their technology (when they make the specification for their technology available for free). Why is Adobe messing with M$ about this? Several applications, both open source as well as closed source, have been created.

Last edited by gohankid77 on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:18

(3 replies) #2 Dark Scizor on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:06

Is it only me that thinks this is LAME?

There's lots of software that incorporates PDF Export capabilities. Why doesn't Adobe, that "all of a sudden" remembered it owns the patent to PDF, go after them as well?

#2.1 jmole on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:15

I'm guessing that the rights to PDF is structured in such a way that freeware or open source can have PDF export cabalities, but companies who will be making a profit off their product, which will use PDF export capabilities, is not allowed unless if adobe is payed.

#2.2 SuBHuMaNGuY on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:26

Yeah, I mean PDF is what the display layer of Mac OS X is built on. Being able to export to PDF is integrated into the very core of OS X and can be done in virtually every application. Maybe Apple hasn't sold enough copies of OS X to make it a viable battle?

Very sketchy...

#2.3 gohankid77 on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:46

Quote -

Adobe publishes the PDF specification to foster the creation of an ecosystem around the PDF format. The PDF Reference provides a description of the Portable Document Format and is intended for application developers wishing to develop applications that create PDF files directly, as well as read or modify PDF document content.

- Adobe, http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer..._reference.html

They make it publicly available and neither the specification nor that page makes reference to any sort of requirement that the PDF technology be used in applications sold for profit (that would make it hard to sell Acrobat Professional, now wouldn't it?)

#3 CocoVG on 02 Jun 2006 - 16:09

From the article: "O'Kelly added that "it's perplexing that Adobe permits other vendors and organizations (e.g., Apple and OpenOffice.org) to publish PDF while Microsoft won't be permitted."

O'Kelly said he did not know whether these other companies and organizations had paid Adobe in order to include a publish-to-PDF capability in their products."

That's my thought too - why other software has the ability, but not Office. I understand that there's a revenue stream to be had adding ANY functionality to Office, but surely the ability to create PDF from the shipping product is worth saving somehow, rather than having to add it on aftermarket by purchasing the full version of Acrobat or an Office compatible PDF printer.

I almost want to call shame on Adobe here. PDF has become a de-facto standard in so many areas - the ability to create it via Office would help maintain that market share for them, and perhaps even increase it. Who needs Microsoft's XPS implementation if everyone can still use PDF?

(1 reply) #4 Quick Reply on 02 Jun 2006 - 17:19

Microsoft should go for it, PDF is so widespread across so many applications (Mac OSX, Foxit Reader, OpenOffice, GPDF, etc) that they should have a legal case do to it, with it's famous army of lawyers. Adobe are just intimidated because they know that Users will choose the software that is already more popular than their own Bloatware, even before it had PDF support.

On the note of Bloatware, why is that software like Foxit Reader, which is less than 3MB uncompressed and uses a single file can open PDFs instantly, While Adobe Reader first comes in a 500kb Download Manager, which then downloads the 20.3MB installer, which takes more than 5 minutes for a new computer or serveral hours on an older computer to initially decompress the installer ("FEAD Optimizer"

, to install 165MB worth of files. Then when you finally just want to open a PDF, it takes 30 seconds or more (10 minutes on an older computer) by the time it loads all the plugins to open it, while using 20MB of memory (Compared to Foxit's 7MB).

#4.1 Xilo on 02 Jun 2006 - 18:41

Don't you know? The longer it takes a program to run and the bigger the size of the program the more enterprisey the software is. And corporations just love enterprisey software...

#5 Julius Caro on 02 Jun 2006 - 20:38

Office 2007 beta 2 doesn't even include a PDF reader or whatever. It can export things to PDF and there's an option to "open file in the viewer" which is, of course, Adobe Reader.

I thought OpenOffice could export things to PDF, I can't see why Office 2007 couldn't. It's like the best feature of office in the last 10 years!

#6 freeeekyyy on 02 Jun 2006 - 22:05

Adobe just wants to get their hands on the MS wallet.

#7 Andy13 on 02 Jun 2006 - 23:12

AH! I knew it. But how about Apple?? OSX has PDF capibilities built right in...so why aren't they being sued too?!

#8 ork on 03 Jun 2006 - 05:28

btw Microsoft SQL 2005 reporting services already have pdf exporting capabilites.

#9 callumy on 03 Jun 2006 - 07:40

Adobe are the next to get greedy huh? We should have known. Sure Microsoft is a big company that rips people off, but that doesn't make it right that Adobe should rip them off. Remember: two wrongs don't make a right! If Adobe don't want XPS or whatever it is to take off, shouldn't they allow MS to use PDF technology as with more people using it, there would be less need for the MS crap. It would also help communications a lot, and would mean that less people would have to fork out for Office, because if someone sends you a Word document and you can't read all of the proprietary advanced formatting in it, then you could always ask them to resend it as a PDF (this is a problem many Mac users have when people who actually own Office send them stuff and they can't read it)!

Cal

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