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Thursday, June 08, 2006
Word to MS and Adobe: Just do it
I've been trying to decide whether to mention the recent battle between Microsoft and Adobe, or not. Mostly, I was just shaking my head over the fact that two software giants can't make something happen. But, now that Adobe has come out with an official statement, I suppose I should give it a little blog time here.
First, Microsoft said it would include PDF support in its upcoming Office 2007. Then MS said it was withdrawing said support when talks between Adobe and MS broke down. I won't get into specifics, but suffice it to say that there was a lot of buzz about this topic over last week or so. Unfortunately, the frenzy was fueled solely by MS's statements on the subject.
Now, today, the guys at Planet PDF took it upon themselves to get Adobe's position on the matter:
[...] in response to allegations made by Microsoft to the press, Adobe has made no determination to take legal action against Microsoft. Further, with regard to any discussions we have had with Microsoft about Office and Vista, our sole motivation is to maintain a fair, competitive landscape in the software industry. Any suggestions to the contrary are unfounded.
That seems reasonable enough for corporate speak with a little legal coaching thrown in for good measure, I guess.
It's tempting to gloat that MS Word does not even have the ability to save as PDF while WordPerfect can not only save as PDF, but also has the ability to open PDFs and edit them as word processing documents. But, I'm not going to gloat. Instead, I want to tell these two goliaths to come to some terms for the sake of users (lest MS invent yet a new format that we'll all have to deal with). And, quickly, too. We've got documents to get working on.
• Posted by: Marie Carnes at 11:14 PM
• Filed in:
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Thinking outloud
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Comments
I, however, will continue to gloat. ;)
Besides, in big huge corporate environments, computers have utilities like pdfFactory installed, which do the same thing as Acrobat, obviating the need for Word to have that capability.
Having said that, I still enjoy creating a document more efficiently in WordPerfect, and then saving it as a DOC or copying the beautiful creation into whatever program the others are using - my minor victory comes from the fact that I was able to create my work in a better program. ;)
Posted by: Krupo at June 9, 2006 10:42 PM
