Adobe has been threatening to sue Microsoft for its attempted inclusion of PDF as
a file type in MS Office 2007 on the “Save As” menu. Here
is a story from June in which MS appears to be backing away from including the
feature at all.
The first beta of MS Word 2007 allowed me “Export” from the file menu to either
PDF or XPS (Microsoft’s printer friendly format, comparable to PDF). This didn’t
seem to give any genuine preference to XPS, but apparently that wasn’t good enough
because Adobe still felt threatened in some way.
The update to MS Office 2007 Beta 2 finds the PDF and XPS “Export” menu item gone,
replaced instead by “Save As” functionality straight to PDF or XPS, making it simpler
than ever to save my MS Word file as PDF. This seems to fly in the face of the
planned software releases that MS proposed back in June, wherein they promised to
remove both formats.
The rub is this: in order to “Save As” PDF or XPS, one cannot simply do it
with MS Word out of the box, but must download
a “plugin” which the application happily points you to on the MS website.
So, does this somehow make Adobe happy? I have to go install a plugin (1 time
install) and this is less threatening to their core business model?
After all that, does Adobe really have a leg to stand on here? The PDF format
is open by Adobe’s own admission. They gave it to Open
Office, for goodness sake. At some point shouldn’t we quit picking on Microsoft
just because its so easy and give them some credit where credit is due? It is
the MS Word user base who wants the save to PDF feature. Heck, I want it.