When Microsoft announced its plans for the "PDF killer" Metro, a lot of thought was given to the likelihood (or not) of this format becoming a credible alternative to Adobe's solidly installed PDF format.

It is true that the announcement, which came in the wake of Adobe's merger plans with Macromedia, clearly pitted Microsoft against Adobe—a company that after the proposed merger may be getting uncomfortably big for Microsoft.

Surprisingly, most analysis of the XML-based Metro format completely overlooked two rather crucial aspects of PDF, which have led to its position in the market today.

The first one is portability: PDF stands for "PORTABLE Document Format" and initially the core vision that drove John Warnock to develop PDF was to be able to render documents identically on a number of platforms, including, at the time, DOS, Windows, Unix and Mac OS, and covering today other platforms such as Palm OS and smart phones.

By contrast, Microsoft has not announced any cross-platform support (after all, who cares about anything except Windows?) and hopes third parties will provide cross-platform functionality. (It is not quite clear from Microsoft's statements whether Metro will require Longhorn to function.)

The second point is more technical, but every bit as crucial, and it is called font embedding. XML is nice and dandy as far as I am concerned (BTW, modern iterations of PDF are also built on XML functionality), but if you do not have a 100 percent reliable way of embedding and rendering fonts regardless of the platform, the whole rendering idea does not fly. However much I may like Arial or Verdana, there is more to typographic life than these "industry standards" for font anonymity.

Font embedding is immensely complex (don't get me started on this), and it took Adobe years to get it right, spawning a cross-platform graphics architecture called AGM (Adobe Graphics Manager) in the process.

Click here to read David Morgenstern's take on Metro.

What does this tell us? Metro is not about PDF; it is about Adobe and even more about control of document standards in the enterprise. The omission of the two features mentioned above clearly shows that Microsoft is not really interested in producing something that can actually compete with PDF, but that it wants to use Windows' and Office's leverage to impose a Microsoft document standard in the enterprise.

The surprising thing is that Microsoft doesn't really seem to notice that it owns that document standard already: It is called Microsoft Office. Apart from PDF, what are the most popular ways of exchanging data today? Word and Excel files. Like it or not, these file types are standards all right.

As for Metro, my prediction is that the format will create little upheaval in the digital document world—unless, of course, it is vastly better than existing formats. Personally, I'm not holding my breath …

Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.