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Microsoft Strips Adobe’s PDF From Office 2007
Alex Bard
Expert Author
Published: 2006-06-05
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The latest beta release of Microsoft's Office 2007 will no longer contain the very popular "save as PDF" option, said a Microsoft executive, according to CRN Daily News.
Microsoft confirmed the alteration following a Wall Street Journal report profiling the breakdown in talks between Microsoft and Adobe regarding Microsoft's plans to embrace Adobe's PDF technology. Adobe has threatened to take legal action against Microsoft in Europe, according to the WSJ report.
"Out relationship with Adobe is very important, so we did want to take steps to address their concerns," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said about the planned changes to Office 2007.
The latest Office 2007 beta has both PDF and Microsoft's own rival XPS document format among the data exporting options. Adobe feared that this would cut into their share of the market, including its distribution of Acrobat products to work with PDFs.
Consequently, Microsoft no longer plans to include PDF export as a default option in Office 2007, Drake said. Users who want it will need to visit Microsoft's Web site and download a patch to restore the functionality.
Microsoft is also giving PC manufacturers and option to remove XPS from Windows Vista and give consumers the opportunity to download a patch to restore it.
There are reports that Adobe is still going to take legal action unless Microsoft agrees to change the PDF support patch. Microsoft has refused.
Adobe has in the past positioned PDF as an open standard and allowed other software developers to directly incorporate support for it into their products. Apple's Mac OS X includes native PDF support, and both StarOffice and OpenOffice include built-in "export to PDF" options.
"Adobe publishes the PDF standard in its entirety and makes it available for free, without restrictions, to anyone who cares to use it," Adobe Senior Director of Public Policy Michael Engelhardt wrote last year in a letter to a Massachusetts state senator. "No one needs permission from Adobe to build their own product with the PDF standard."
MS Strips PDF
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Alex Bard is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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