Head lines, strategy and competition. That seems to be the theme of the week as the tech news headlines of this week are, indeed, interesting, exciting and big.
Headlines Aglow!
First one to come out this week concerned Adobe. The PDF proprietor announced, on Monday, its decision to release the PDF 1.7 specification to the International Standards Organization (ISO) via the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) working group. Taking a major step, Adobe strategically plans on changing the format’s de facto standard status to that of an ISO standard.
Second major headline in the news is the consumer release of Microsoft’s Vista Operating System and Office 2007 on Tuesday at 12:01 am. This is also big as Vista, successor to Windows XP, will undoubtedly raise the bar even higher when it comes to the innovation of desktop computer software and the PC industry.
When Worlds Collide There Is A Strategy
However, behind the great news, one can’t help but read between the (head)lines. For instance, one Vista innovation that concerns the PDF corner of the universe is the native XPS functionality. XPS documents are representations of paper documents described by an XML-based language, which look and act very much like PDF documents in nature.
The question on everyone’s mind: “What influence will it have in the PDF industry?” Let’s take a brief look at the main factors.
Well, just like the PDF, XPS is an open standard, which invites third-party development. This use of Open XML technology gives Microsoft the opportunity to level that contribution/participation playing field on which the PDF has been dominant.
Another thing to mention is the fact that Microsoft is proprietor and developer of widely used software suites, making the distribution of that functionality on every PC a simple thing. XPS ubiquity wouldn’t be too hard to imagine.
XPS is also device independent on the platform level, yet handy at the doc application level. With that added convenience, the interoperability envelope is pushed one more inch.
The question, I guess, is now begging to be answered. And it seems as if it’s being responded to. . . .
Adobe’s push to make the PDF an open standard comes years after the format’s establishment, and just before the release of Vista—the OS toting support for its flagship’s alternative.
And yet, let’s not forget that Adobe has also been at work with XML, developing, not the XPS, but, the Mars document. . . .
Thus far, as a de facto standard, the PDF has been under a broad range of third party development and innovation from PDF software companies. Despite tools, viewers and converters, though, Adobe has always controlled the PDF specification. Standardizing it will, in a sense, put them slightly out of the driver’s seat as ISO will make refinements and changes to the format’s nature.
However, keep in mind, several of the PDF’s subsets (PDF/A, PDF/X and PDF/E) are already ISO approved standards, or in the process of becoming one. In addition, two other subsets have been added to the list and are also in the works. These standards are implemented and followed as industry requirements. By submitting the PDF 1.7 spec to ISO, Adobe solidifies and elevates the PDF’s “de facto”, usage-based status into the same official standards category as its subsets.
Hmmm. . . .
Competition Still Stirring?
In June, the anti-trust legal dispute over XPS began a small blip on the Microsoft-Adobe radar that consistently beeped the countdown to R-Day (Release Day) ever since. It seems a bit bigger than a blip now, doesn’t it?
Yet, with these big giant leaps for all user-kind, there seems to be something more behind that velvet curtain than we first assumed, something with bigger questions now at stake: How will both these developments affect established workflows? What does this mean for the PDF user?
