Editor’s note: A senior vice-president of ScanSoft--a company aggressively appealing to the general office workers using PDF in their daily document workflow with advertising in magazines such as BusinessWeek--chimes in with an alternative perspective to the PDFzone editorial published 10/15 calling for Adobe to release an Acrobat Elements-type desktop application available on a single-user basis.

PDFzone: Do you think Adobe should release a single-user, $30 PDF creation application for the desktop a la Elements?

Robert Weideman: That product is already there. We’ve developed a product family geared toward what business people need for PDF at a price point that’s affordable. PDF Create!, a $49.99 product, allows you to drag and drop files into a palette and create PDFs in batch, or to merge them into a single PDF. It supports PDF 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, password security, permissions, watermarking. We’ve distilled out of full Acrobat what we think is needed in an office environment. So it’s more than Elements, less than Acrobat is, but focused on the office environment.

PDFzone: What would it mean to ScanSoft if Adobe released Elements or a similarly featured application with a single-user license and priced it at $30, as PDFzone called for a couple weeks ago?

Weideman: The way we look at the market--and we’re not slamming Adobe--is that Adobe’s world revolves around an adoption of PDF as the container for business document workflows: Fill out a form, as PDF, sign it, and add annotations and comments.

In our world, we are format-independent. We embrace PDF the same way we embrace Microsoft formats. Microsoft is on the other side of the world, saying you should do everything in Office formats--you should do track changes and collaborative edits in Word, you should do your workflow in SharePoint, you should do digital rights management in the Microsoft Office formats.

So we don’t look at it and say “What if Adobe came to market with an inexpensive PDF product?” but instead, we respond to our customers who say “There’s times I have the original PDF but I don’t have the original Word document. Instead of re-keying it by hand, do you have a tool that can turn PDF into a fully formatted Word document?” That’s where our PDF Converter product came from.

We don’t have an established product line we need to protect by putting seat limits on it to keep people from getting access to it.

PDFzone:  So ScanSoft’s in the position to do what Adobe can’t, in other words?

Weideman: Our position is that PDF has moved beyond Adobe. They’ve done an excellent job in establishing it as an industry standard, and an open standard in the sense that third parties can develop products on it. It’s in everybody’s interest that there are multiple vendors who can deliver products; from an industry point of view, it’s a good thing that there are third-party products from Global Graphics, that ScanSoft offers products that answer cross-industry needs as well as pricing needs.

But it’s not just delivering PDF at a better price, though. Adobe’s vested interest revolves around PDF. The ability to have PDF co-exist with other formats like Word isn’t directly in line with what Adobe’s doing. Having third parties out there who can be, kind of, Switzerland, and deliver unique capabilities that are beneficial to end users is also important.

PDFzone: Another piece of the puzzle is marketing. Adobe is a billion-dollar company, and no one else is. Can third-party vendors do what Adobe could if it came out with “Acrobat Lite?”

Weideman: If you take a look at the third-party PDF market, it comprises:

• Many small companies [offering free PDF creation tools] that not only don’t have the marketing reach, but may not be viewed as a secure supplier to a large company that wants to buy a large amount of product
• Global Graphics, who has done an excellent job on the engineering side but who comes at the market from their OEM RIP business ... their products haven’t historically been in Staples, they haven’t historically been viewed as a strong desktop application supplier.
• ScanSoft is really the first third-party vendor for PDF that does have the historical strength of getting into the retail channel (CompUSA, Staples) and has an established customer base on the order of 15 million registered users of office productivity applications. Our view is that we can become the premier supplier for those people interested in PDF in the context of office productivity, because we have strength there.

It took Adobe a lot of money and over 10 years to get PDF and Acrobat to where it is today. We think that we can fill the gap in delivering products more in tune to office workers--by that we mean in price, performance, and features that, for some reason, Adobe hasn’t delivered.

Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7 can both save a PDF as Microsoft Word. It does an okay job. But if it’s complicated [columns, newsletter layouts, forms], it doesn’t do a very good job. Our PDF Converter product does.

PDFzone: We hear that a lot from developers outside of San Jose--“Adobe does X, we do Y, and we don’t really compete with other third party PDF vendors, because they do Z.” If that’s truly the case, here’s an idea: Would it be possible that the third-party PDF software vendors could band together to create some sort of marketing co-op that not only reached more users together than they could separately--and to push Adobe into building features into the PDF spec that would enable you to better meet the needs of your customers?

Weideman: I’d have to think about whether there’s an open PDF consortium that would make sense. The challenge is that, at the end of the day, all of us are beholden to Adobe being true to their stated objective of allowing PDF to be an open format.

This new feature in Acrobat 7 Pro that turns on a feature that makes the free Reader available for commenting...will third parties be able to develop products that flip that switch too, or is that just a veiled way of Adobe trying to make PDF a proprietary format again? If they’re starting to preserve things inside the PDF specification that gives them a clear advantage over a third party PDF supplier...then what they’re really up to is making PDF proprietary. That’s going to be a bad thing for the PDF third-party community.

Adobe may start off with a small thing like commenting in Reader, but one can imagine a future release of the PDF specification or an application that does something more dramatic that makes it difficult for vendors like Global Graphics and us to provide alternative PDF implementations.

Is Adobe’s real, heart-to-heart objective with PDF as an open standard? If they were to see too much success by [Global Graphics or ScanSoft], are they going to make it a proprietary format? If they were to see an open consortium form around it, would they take a cooperative approach or a combative approach? I don’t know the answer.

PDFzone: Interesting how you view that commenting feature from your position outside San Jose.

Weideman: If Adobe starts to put handcuffs around PDF, there are going to be fewer PDF products, not more. And more expensive pricing, and not less expensive pricing.