p2p news / p2pnet: Overwhelming customer demand for PDF support in Microsoft Office 2007, “was received really well,” says Microsoft Office program manager Brian Jones in a blog.

But according to him, “that’s not going to happen, and one of the possible reasons is, Adobe wanted us to charge our customers extra for the Save as PDF capability, which we just aren’t willing to do (especially given that other companies already offer it for free).”

Jones says his PDF support announcement was probably one of his most widely read posts of the year.

But, “Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to do the right thing for the customer now,” he declares sadly, “There was a news article in the WSJ today (and now on CNet) indicating that Adobe didn’t like that we provided the save to pdf functionality directly in the box, and so they`ve been pushing us to take it out.

“I’m still trying to figure that one out given that PDF is usually viewed as an open standard and there are other office suites out there that already support PDF output. I don’t see us providing functionality that’s any different from what others are doing.”

So, “it looks like we’re going to offer it as a free download instead,” says Jones. “At least that way it’s still free for Office users, but unfortunately now there is an added hassle in that anyone that wants the functionality is going to have to download it separately.”

Jones goes on that he also finds Adobe decision surprising, “given that certain governments have viewed PDF as being more open than Open XML,” Adobe, “seems to be saying that PDF is actually not open (or that it is open for some, but not for others). I’m not sure that any of those government policy makes could justify this outcome.”

But Jones hopes Adobe will realise this is a mistake, “and that they probably shouldn’t try to sue people for using an open file format.”

And people let Adobe know this is, “just a bad thing all around,” he suggests.

Also See:
blog – Legal issues around PDF support, June 2, 2006

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