When Adobe provides the stats, it's staggering how far PDF's come. Take off the rose-colored glasses, it's still impressive--yet there's work to do.
Among the documents Adobe provided the media supporting the release of Acrobat 7 was a fact sheet
outlining the pervasiveness of PDF in the world. A small sampling of the
eye-popping collection of stats:
- As a de
facto (in practice) standard, 9.2% of the Web’s 162 terabytes of content
comprises PDF files; more than 20 million PDF files are available for
download; Web content creators have linked to the Adobe Reader download
675,000 times so far
- As a de
jure (in principle) standard, PDF/X is an ISO standard for the reliable
delivery of press-ready, high-end color advertisements; PDF/A is a proposed
ISO standard for the long term preservation and archiving of digital records;
and PDF/Engineering and PDF/Accessible are both under consideration for
adoption under their respective standards bodies
- As a government-mandated standard, Germany,
the U.K. and many U.S. national agencies have standardized on PDF for
electronic document delivery; countless state and local governments have
joined them
These accomplishments attest that Adobe’s sales and marketing staff have
turned the company’s well-engineered software, originally created for the
graphic design market, into a must-have application in the business world--no
easy feat.
It also proves the supposition of Adobe visionaries early in Acrobat’s
life: that if they made PDF a public file spec as Adobe had done with TIFF and
PostScript, a market would grow up around PDF, with third-party developers
supplying applications for the document format that Adobe couldn’t or didn’t
want to supply.
Bravo. Now it’s time to get back to work.
While the Latin phrases (de facto,
de jure) look impressive when describing PDF as a standard, a French one
comes to mind when thinking about any technology: du jour. And that’s what PDF is right
now, the document format of the day.
Adobe will have to work hard to stave off whatever it is Microsoft has up
its sleeve--and rest assured, at some point the Redmond brain trust will
bum-rush the show with its own PDF substitute and call it better, faster and
free to those who buy Windows machines. It’s not a question of if, but
when.
Adobe must continue to fight--hard--the perception that it’s a little-‘ol
graphics software company catering to people who design print publications and
Web sites. For years it’s been patently clear to those of us covering Adobe that
it has focused Acrobat development on the business, government and educational
market, while simultaneously building in features to make the software even more
robust for the prepress users who buttered Acrobat’s bread for so many years.
The server products in the Acrobat line can accomplish heavy IT lifting
like no Adobe software we’ve ever seen. But out in the marketplace, a few key
ignorant people--some of them holding the software-buying purse strings of large
corporations--still see Adobe as Photoshop and Illustrator; they just don’t
understand PDF’s relevance to the general office user. Adobe must reach out to
those people by targeting its PDF message to the countless general-office users
who contact us at PDFzone every day, asking “Why can’t I create or at least edit
a PDF in Reader? Working with this PDF stuff is like trying to crack a safe!”
Figuring into this mandate is the issue of cost. Let’s not kid anyone:
The brand war/mind-share battle is won on the street. If someone wants to make a
PDF and experiment with the document format, their Adobe-branded choices are
$299 retail for Acrobat 7 Standard, and $449 for Pro. Or 1,000 copies of Acrobat
Elements. Or Create PDF Online. (If they can find it. People who can’t figure
out that Reader doesn’t make PDFs probably are Google-challenged, too, yet their
money spends just as well as the technophiles’ does.)
There are quality alternatives to Acrobat. Jaws PDF Creator ain’t chopped
liver, that’s for sure, and many other excellent PDF-creation applications out
there can accomplish what the general office user wants. But they don’t have the
marketing firepower behind them that Acrobat has, even if they’re as good as or
better for the general office user. Adobe’s got the Cadillac PDF software at a
Cadillac price.
It’s time for Adobe to make a Hyundai, too. Or at least a Ford. Now.
While the stock is flying high, while revenues are exceeding expectations--and
not when the business cycle goes into its next down phase and Adobe will appear
to be scrambling to make up lost sales ground.
Adobe, we presume, wants to make PDF even more of a de facto standard than it is now. Along
the lines of how HTML is a de facto
standard for Web communication. In order to get there, Adobe’s going to have to
release a single-user version of Elements or some other inexpensive ($30),
baseline, feature-stripped PDF creation utility. And make it downloadable, sold
in boxes at Staples, OfficeMax and at all the popular mail-order sites. Then
when the man--or woman--on the street sees the beauty of using PDF for their
business, they will need to upgrade to Standard or Pro. And as PDF use grows in
their businesses, they’ll at some point look at the LiveCycle server.
Until that day,
PDF will remain a de facto mystery to
some potential customers, IT people who either make purchasing decisions or
influence them. They will continue to look elsewhere for their business-software
needs because they just don’t quite get what it is Adobe does. And until the
rank and file who work under them can go to Staples and buy a $30 piece of
software that can crank out PDFs, they will continue to pepper PDFzone with
questions such as, “Explain again how to make a PDF in Reader?” They’re not
going to fork over $449 to find the answer.
