Opinion: ARTS PDF detonates cozy relationship with Adobe to release an Acrobat competitor. What's gonna happen now?I can't tell you where I first heard this apocryphal story, but I know it's been told to me a least a couple-three times going through the stack of history courses one takes en route to what my alma mater called a BSJ degree (the "J" standing for "journalism"; you fill in the rest of the blanks):
Alfred Nobel, after inventing dynamite, realized he'd created a monster weapon that man could use in war against his fellow man. Racked with regret, he shouted, "What have I done?" to the heavens, quit his job and devoted the rest of his life to making amends by sinking his quite considerable riches into developing the peace prize that he named after himself.
(It didn't really happen that way. In fact, Nobel, a reclusive single man, shocked the world after he died in 1896 by revealing the peace prize in his will.)
Click here to read Jim Felici's review of Nitro.
In the same way that Nobel shook up the industry with dynamite—his invention that enabled the safe transport of nitroglycerin, a volatile explosive his factories made that wasn't ordinarily stable for shipping—ARTS PDF remade the market for PDF software by announcing Nitro PDF, a PDF-making Acrobat competitor, at the Acrobat & PDF Conference in Orlando, Fla., in April.
This kind of shakeup—if, indeed, Adobe's rock-solid footing in the market can be shaken—can only be good for us people who use PDF on a daily basis for better communication and productivity. Competition will spur innovation and economies that Adobe might not be "inspired" to create without a touch of competitive goading.
Acrobat competitors abound, from Global Graphics' Jaws PDF Creator to ActivePDF Composer to dozens of free applications; it's not really news that another one popped up for sale.
What is news is that, while Nitro is downloadable now, starting in January it will be available at retail stores—if all goes according to ARTS' plan. Another box hailing itself as a stand-alone application will be competing directly with Acrobat at a fraction of the price ($99) in 16,000 stores worldwide, a majority of them in the United States. Many of those stores also carry ScanSoft's PDF Converter Pro, another $99 box that competes with Acrobat.
The list of retail chains that will carry Nitro, says ARTS PDF CEO Karl de Abrew, includes Wal-Mart, Fry's, Circuit City and OfficeMax.
While taking on Adobe on this scale would seem an ambitious move for any software company, it's particularly interesting for ARTS, which has maintained very close ties with Adobe for a decade, both as a PDF developer and as the driving force behind the PlanetPDF Web site.
Click here to read about ARTS PDF's Aerialist Professional.
What will this mean for De Abrew and Co.? This Nitro blast might be a blaze of glory, and with it, they're certainly going to burn some bridges. His opening salvo:
"You might remember the 'Simplicity at Work' ad campaign that Adobe unveiled back in late 2004 to increase Adobe's visibility as an enterprise software player—it centered around a new tagline 'Better by Adobe,'" De Abrew says. "Well, what we're hearing from our customers right now is that with the release of Nitro, 'Why buy Adobe?'
"Time and time again we hear it: People want the power of Acrobat, but not the price tag that goes with it. And as much as Adobe might like to have Acrobat sit alongside Microsoft Office, it's not going to happen whilst they treat it like just another Creative Suite application such as Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator."
Those are some explosive words.
Next Page: Acrobat competitors use different engines.
In the same breath, however, De Abrew does say that ARTS plans to keep on developing its Acrobat plug-ins, such as Crackerjack and Aerialist, so while the company might not maintain the cozy relationship with San Jose that it had in the past, the success of ARTS still remains tied to Acrobat's success.
So what is this Nitro, anyway? We asked a very famous source whom, this week, we'll call Deep Throat, in honor of the Watergate character who came forward recently. Our source broke down the differences between the Global Graphics PDF engine (which drives Jaws and activePDF Composer), Adobe (Acrobat) and Zeon (Nitro and ScanSoft PDF Converter).
For heavy-duty, hardcore PDF power users, yes, Acrobat's engine beats both of its competitors: PDF Conference organizer Carl Young said in an earlier article on PDFzone that only Acrobat can make PDFs truly accessible to people with vision disabilities to the satisfaction of federal regulators, and our Deep Throat agrees with him.
Click here to read Don Fluckinger's take on the Adobe-Macromedia merger.
Jaws, our source says, can hold its own for prepress use, but it has trouble handling non-Roman character sets. Zeon can take on non-Roman character sets, but it's weak in prepress.
Except for those issues and some of the features tightly integrating Acrobat with Microsoft Office applications that aren't present in Nitro and PDF Converter, however, the typical office user "making PDFs from Word or doing the basic PDF viewing, document assembly, form filling—they won't really notice any technical differences," our Deep Throat says. "In that case, [deciding which one to buy] will turn into UI issues or other 'value adds.'"
Don't count out ScanSoft, Deep Throat says. With PDF Converter Professional 3 integrated with its robust OCR engine—and a long history of retail distribution—this software could give both Acrobat and Nitro a run for their money.
So the battle is enjoined. It looks like ARTS has pretty much blown up its relationship with Adobe in order to slice off a piece of the end-user and volume-licensing market Acrobat largely commands.
And, maybe, to expand the market that's already there, bringing users to the Nitro table who couldn't—or wouldn't—fork over the big bucks for Acrobat.
"As for Adobe's reaction, well, Adobe is a large company made up of many, many employees," De Abrew says. "Some people are real supporters of Nitro and think it's great we're expanding the reach of PDF—making it really accessible to all.
"Some others view anything that might impact on their bottom line as being a negative, even if it's growing the size of the market [which is already massive]. Overall though, we've had a very professional response from Adobe, which we believe indicates they appreciate the energy and drive that a little good ol' competition in the space is going to bring."
That's the right way to look at it: Competition will drive down the $449 retail price of Acrobat, which clearly blows away the alternatives in features, prepress capability and hooks into Office apps that really do increase productivity.
If healthy competition doesn't inspire Adobe to lower Acrobat's price, maybe it will finally spur the company to release a single-user copy of Acrobat Elements for $30 to $50, and thus give the world an affordable, Adobe-branded desktop PDF creation application that the average Joe or Joanna can slide through on their OfficeMax order.
No one mentions this additional benefit, either: All the Jaws, ScanSoft and Nitro sales—and Elements licenses too—show the office user just how much they need PDF. Once they figure that out, some of them probably will decide to step up to Acrobat Pro, to get access to all its bells and whistles. These entry-level apps can serve the same way as feature-limited trial versions of Acrobat might.
I say to ARTS: Go get 'em, guys. Damn the torpedoes.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
