Opinion: Microsoft's demo at WinHEC for Longhorn's printing and document architecture, "Metro," looks promising. But getting software and hardware vendors to join the party may be tough.Adobe Systems' top brass can't seem to catch a break. Last week, company execs were riding high with the
acquisition of competitor Macromedia for $3.4 billion. Now, following Bill Gates' showing of Microsoft's forthcoming "Metro" document format and print architecture to developers at WinHEC in Seattle, some analysts say the end is near for Adobe PDF.
That "near" is relative, since the technology won't make its way into the market until late 2006 with the release of Windows Longhorn. In the past, Microsoft had told partners that it was planning to provide some form of document-management capability in its next-generation operating system.
However, the exact implementation was unclear, as Longhorn's feature set kept slipping. At WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference), hardware developers—that is, printer manufacturers—discovered that the architecture code-named Metro was the solution.
However, Microsoft officials in Seattle denied that the company is taking aim at Adobe with Metro.
"One aspect of what we're addressing with Metro is fixed document format, which happens to be tied into [Longhorn's presentation subsystem] Avalon and XAML [Avalon's XML Applied Markup Language]," Microsoft's lead product manager for Windows, Greg Sullivan, explained to Microsoft Watch.
Read the full story on Publish.com: Microsoft's Metro May Not Kill Adobe PDF After All
