News Analysis: Wonky OS puts the PDF community in a pickle, as few customers upgrade and others cling for dear life to ye olde XP/NT/2003
One doesn't rely on CompUSA clerks to dispense wisdom regarding many dilemmas in life, but at the store in my town, Darren (his job security depends on me using a fake name) summarized my Vista experience perfectly.
"It's great, as long as you're willing to start over with all new hardware that's known to run on it," he said, while I slumped deeper into one of their comfy armchairs used to induce customers to buy HDTVs. "I think a lot of people are just keeping XP—or buying new laptops without Vista—and hoping what comes after Vista will be better."
At that moment, I realized he was right. It took his evaluation of the situation to finally write off a months-long quest to get my Vista-wired laptop to talk to my cell phone, camera, voice recorder, and, for that matter, a couple of Napster To Go MP3 players.
Gone, all of it. Never will get the hours or money invested back. Move on.
It's all fun and games in my personal universe of work and play, but what about in real life, where IT guys and gals have to invest millions on Windows computers and Acrobat seats? What about the third-party Acrobat developers who serve them and the educators who make their living teaching users how to use the bells and whistles?
The long and the short answer, says Tim Sullivan of activePDF, a third-party developer whose installed base works on many flavors of Windows, is to in keep XP, Vista, whatever in one bucket.
ActivePDF keeps one compiled version of each of its product to work with all the flavors of Windows the company supports—from Vista going back to Windows 98. The Vista situation, for this Microsoft ISV partner, isn't much more thorny than the NT/2000/2003 support issues it has had to work through for the last seven years, he says.
Vista's just a piece (and a small piece, at that, because of its unpopularity) of what they're supporting. A fickle market doesn't seem to be a life-and-death situation for activePDF, which also has to run its software on old versions of Acrobat back to 5, too, further complicating the issue.
"Our server products are not designed to run on Vista, although we have some customers that use Vista for developer support," says Sullivan, who says activePDF as a company prefers XP and keeps a few machines loaded with Vista to test products like PrimoPDF, its free PDF writer. "It took some time to get past some of the Vista idiosyncrasies, [but] we've never really heard any feedback on Vista from our customers."
Ted Padova, author of the Adobe Acrobat Bible and well-known instructor, says that there hasn't been much call for Acrobat education on the Vista front—even though Adobe souped up Acrobat's features for the new OS, including adding "ribbon" compatibility that makes it simple and straightforward to organize Acrobat's many buttons and features.
"I don't find that many people who are using Vista," Padova says. "I think people from companies with large installations are holding off upgrading, while some individual and small businesspeople may be the ones experimenting with the new OS upgrade—that's just a feeling I have and not founded on any research."
One place you won't find people running Vista yet is at the federal Internal Revenue Service, arguably the largest enterprise installation of Acrobat on earth.
"Vista at IRS is at least one year away," says Paul Showalter, senior technical printing specialist, who adds that the IT department is still testing Vista and they're not planning to roll out Office 2007 until spring or even summer 2008. "They take their time."
"I have heard many people complain about the upgrade and what doesn't work. That is why Dell and others now offer computers with XP on it. When Vista was released, they stopped selling XP. Now, because of all the problems, they have gone back to selling it."
