Opinion: Both cowboys are wearing the black hats in the latest Microsoft-Adobe shootout, but Adobe's got a lot more to lose by forcing PDF out of Office.
The visionary Adobe co-founder
John Warnock knew he had a good thing on his hands when he first drew a rough sketch of Acrobat and PDF in the early 1990s. When he saw his company's 1.0 version, he thought it was such a good thing that he wanted to charge for the viewer, the predecessor of today's Adobe Reader.
Warnock surrounded himself with—and listened to—smart lieutenants, who eventually convinced him that Reader should be free of charge, and that the PDF standard should be a public platform upon which any developer could build.
More than any other, those two decisions led to the PDF revolution and netted untold financial riches for Warnock and current Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen. But that's a pattern that very well might change in the wake of last week's Microsoft-Adobe smackdown.
PDF has a seemingly infinite reach over the Internet and the enterprise desktop because Adobe ceded a chunk of control over the standard to the market, thus giving third-party developers the power to address the market's needs. So while it's never a good idea to side with Microsoft, many onlookers see Adobe as hypocritical in forbidding a developer — even one as large as Microsoft — to incorporate PDF tools into its applications.
Adobe balking at a developer isn't the only unusual facet of this story. Microsoft—never one to back down from a fight—is oh-so-willing to make concessions to Adobe — and what's up with that? Redmond agreed to yank PDF features out of Office 2007 and, furthermore, will offer PC manufacturers the option to leave its own PDF-like XPS file-making apparatus off OEM copies of Windows Vista.
That doesn't sound like the company that famously flexed its monopoly muscle to kill Netscape.
Then there's this: Microsoft will offer both PDF and XPS export features as a downloadable free patch for Office end users. Adobe agreed to that. Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, er, California.
Something must have gone on behind the scenes that hasn't revealed itself yet. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might imagine that Adobe got word of Microsoft plans that Adobe worried would render Acrobat redundant, or at least make PDF subordinate to XPS. So Adobe goes after Microsoft now, guns blazing, taking the offense against the perceived predator.
It doesn't quite add up that Micrososoft caved so quickly. Battered in the federal courts already, Big Bad Microsoft may just be turning over a new leaf, wary of a multi-national legal war with Adobe.
Methinks Bill Gates doth give in too easily. The corollary to my conspiracy theory goes something like this: This PDF-and-XPS kerfuffle's a distraction from some terrible—as in, Death Star–terrible—PDF-eating technology that Microsoft still has under wraps, for which Adobe will have no answer. It's quietly being built while we jabber on about the red herring that is XPS.
Either way, Adobe will take a beating over last week's threatened legal wrangling. Not just in public opinion and in the open-source debate rooms, but in private among developers, without whom PDF could not have extended its reach in the enterprise, the prepress world, and in government/education settings.
PDF isn't an open standard. But it's a public standard; it's understood that you, I, and any of the 1,800 companies who publish PDF software are allowed to develop what we want.
But Adobe's latest move changes everything. It's perfectly rational for a developer to wonder, "If Adobe can shove Microsoft around, what will they do to my little company?"
Because of the nature of the "public standard," Adobe's free to take the actions it did. Free to, at the same time, alienate its most important partner; squelch the unfettered growth of PDF in the enterprise thanks to Microsoft putting PDF export into Office; and make a once-hardy developer network skittish and likely to seek alternative work.
All those things could come to pass as a result of Adobe's actions.
After sitting through Global Graphics' excellent presentation comparing XPS to PDF last month at the Orlando Acrobat & PDF Conference, II walked up to activePDF president Tim Sullivan, and said to him, "Man, I've just seen the future, and you might consider renaming your company activeXPS."
"No comment," he said with a grin, just what you'd expect from a man who derives his living working with both Microsoft and Adobe. "But I'm not changing the name of my company."
Yet for other PDF developers, the grass on the Microsoft/XPS side of the fence has got to be looking greener every day. Chizen should look back at Adobe history and follow Warnock's example, understanding how Microsoft would butter his bread in the same way the other 1,800 Acrobat and PDF developers do.
That is, unless he's grown tired of the infinitely deep cornucopia of industry goodwill (not to mention piles of cash) the keeping-PDF-public policy has netted his company—and him personally—over the last decade.
Graphics Tools 
