The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Adobe is poised to sue Microsoft over Microsoft's planned PDF support in Office 2007. Microsoft allegedly is removing the export-to-PDF capability at Adobe's request.It's not surprising that Adobe Systems is worried about Microsoft's growing
encroachments into its core markets. But now Adobe is said to be ready to take its dissatisfaction to the courts.
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 2 that Adobe is poised to launch an antitrust suit in Europe against Microsoft, following the break-down of four-month-long talks over Microsoft's Office 2007 PDF plans.
Microsoft announced in October 2005 that it was building into Office 2007 a PDF export capability, following requests for such a feature by its customers. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is now planning to remove that feature, at the request of Adobe. Adobe also sought to get Microsoft to charge for the export-to-PDF capability, but so far Microsoft is not planning to do so, according to the Journal.
Microsoft and Adobe officials did not respond to a request for comment on the Wall Street Journal report by the time this article was published.
Microsoft was not planning to embed a PDF reader into Office 2007. Instead, Microsoft is integrating its own PDF/Postscript competitor, known as the XML Paper Specification (XPS) into Windows Vista. The Wall Street Journal story did not mention XPS as a bone of contention between the two companies.
Microsoft also is working on new Web-design products that will go head-to-head with existing Adobe offerings. Microsoft's Expression family of design tools, which are currently in beta test and expected to begin shipping in 2006 or 2007, are set to compete with Adobe's Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator products.
Microsoft said last fall that Office 2007 would be able to output PDF documents compatible with any PDF viewer that supports version 1.4 of the public Adobe PDF specification. Office 2007 PDF documents were expected to be accessible to screen readers, the company said. Microsoft SharePoint-related products also were set to be able to index PDF documents for use in enterprise content management scenarios, Microsoft added.
Adobe charges for its PDF add-ons to Microsoft Office, according to industry analysts, and earns substantial revenues from that business.
"This clearly is not a positive development for organizations that use Adobe's PDF format," said Burton Group analyst Peter O'Kelly. Microsoft added the PDF export capability due to widespread Office customer demand, and it appears Adobe intends to prevent Microsoft from addressing the demand (at least not without increasing the price of Office and, I assume, channeling part of that incremental revenue to Adobe).
O'Kelly added that "it's perplexing that Adobe permits other vendors and organizations (e.g., Apple and OpenOffice.org) to publish PDF while Microsoft won't be permitted."
O'Kelly said he did not know whether these other companies and organizations had paid Adobe in order to include a publish-to-PDF capability in their products.
" In any case, it's difficult to imagine how this will result in either customer good will or expanded business opportunities for Adobe. It's another example of how the multifaceted and historically largely productive relationship between Adobe and Microsoft is shifting from complementary to competitive."
