Opinion: No matter your politics, finally we get a face to attach to PDF and Acrobat, a largely faceless technologyBefore we get into this—so the Fox News conspiracy theorists can make their accusations without actually having to read this whole opinion piece—I, like a majority of Americans, voted for Al Gore in 2000.
I'm not one of those neocon nut jobs who disagrees with everything Al Gore says because I'm still feeling defensive about stealing the White House from its rightful occupant in 2000.
Yet it even gave me pause when Chris Smith of AGI called to say he'd landed the former veep to keynote his 2007 Acrobat & PDF show in Orlando.
Al Gore? He was so . . . 1990s.
After a little closer examination, however, it starts to make more sense. Whether you lean to the right or left politically, if you earn your living—or a slice of it—working with PDF, you have Al Gore to thank in part.
He didn't invent PDF—like he allegedly claimed to have invented the Internet, refuted here by Seth Finkelstein—but Gore did promote environmental causes tirelessly, and continues to with his books. Once he became second in command of the U.S. government, he pushed for the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, which paved the way for the adoption of electronic document standards and the ascension of PDF.
"He was very involved in paperwork reduction and trying to make government agencies to operate more efficiently, more effectively," Smith says. "It was a mantra he was chanting long ahead of many others--so he was a visionary in that regard."
In effect, when Acrobat Reader spread like wildfire, expanding its installed base from a few thousand desktops to everybody's, Al Gore was one of the people fanning the flames.
In 2006, Gore's on the way back up, making recent headlines with the feature film An Inconvenient Truth, (out on DVD next week). He also hasn't sat still since the 2000 election fiasco; currently sitting on the Apple board of directors and serving as a senior advisor to Google, Gore's more involved in high tech than most people would presume.
Now he's going to be talking about Acrobat and PDF, making headlines in our corner of the tech world for at least one day next May.
And we need it. PDF and Acrobat are hard things to sell, not because they're impractical, but because they're hard to describe, or as my eWeek colleague Steve Bryant puts it in his Intermedia blog, boring. They're like wrenches, or car tires: Completely essential but sometimes hard to discuss with enthusiasm.
Making Al Gore the face of PDF for a day might just be the thing this market needs to catapult the technology into the public eye. After all, he's a polarizing figure. Like him or not, his name is synonymous with giving a crap about the environment. That's always been one of the great selling points of PDF that even the non-geek can understand.
Now, if Chris Smith could sign up a Britney Spears or Paris Hilton to make the topic of PDF forms a bit more sexy at his 2008 show, that would be some kind of follow up.
