Adobe zickt 'rum, und will sich nun wohl bei der EU-Kommission für Wettbewerbsrecht beschweren, wahrscheinlich zum Schutz der Bürger Europas. Und was hat der Anwender davon? Nichts als Ärger, so wie ich auch - denn anstatt den Umweg über den Distiller gehen zu müssen hätte ich den NETzWERK Newsletter zukünftig in MS Word schreiben können. Daraus wird nun wohl nichts.

Hintergrund: In den Beta-Versionen von Office 2007 existiert die Funktion "Save as ...", beiepielsweise um Dokumente im Portable Document Format abzuspeichern. Während die Amateure von Wikipedia noch glauben es handele sich dabei um ein "herstellerneutrales, offenes und standard-basierendes Format", wissen es einige Leute besser und bezeichnen es - richtigerweise - als "ein herstellergebundenes PostScript-Dateiformat von Adobe". Und Adobe hat aus wirtschaftlichen Gründen scheinbar absolut kein Interesse daran, daß Microsoft den Kundenwunsch nach Speicherung in einem unveränderlichen Format erfüllt. Die Gespräche zwischen Microsoft und Adobe wurden gerade ergebnislos abgebrochen, und aus Sicht von Microsoft lautet der aktuelle Stand:

"Over the last several months, Adobe has expressed concerns to us about some new features in Office and Windows Vista. Specifically, they have complained about the “Save as PDF” capability in Office 2007 and the “XPS” feature in Windows Vista (XPS is our own version of a fixed format document capability).  While these features have been carefully designed to comply with all regulatory obligations, in an effort to accommodate Adobe, we have offered make changes to our products and even to ship their products with Windows.  Specifically, these changes include:

  • We are planning to remove Save as PDF, as well as Save as XPS, from Office 2007 and make both available only as a separate download
  • We will give OEMs the option to remove XPS from Windows
  • We have offered to ship Adobe’s Flash and Shockwave software with every copy of Windows Vista worldwide

Unfortunately, these steps are not enough for Adobe and they are threatening to take legal action (we think most likely is a complaint to the European Union)."

Worum es eigentlich geht, und mit welchen harten Bandagen hier gerungen wird, enthüllt - zumindest teilweise - folgende Hintergrundinformation:

"Our 'Save as PDF' feature was initially included in beta versions of Office 2007 in response to the more than tens of thousands of inquiries we receive from customers each month requesting this specific feature. We added it because Adobe had previously released its Portable Document Format (PDF) specifications as an open standard, one which has been widely implemented for free by other software developers including Apple, Sun, Corel and OpenOffice. 
 
When asked recently about the 'openness' of PDF by a Massachusetts senator, an Adobe executive explicitly stated that 'no one needs permission from Adobe to build their own product with the PDF standard.'  The executive also said that Adobe makes the PDF standard 'available for free, without restrictions, to anyone who cares to use it.'  Given statements such as these, we felt including support for the format in our products was an entirely reasonable course of action.

We have been asked by Adobe to not only remove 'Save as PDF' from Office, but to charge customers a price for it as well. We are willing to remove it and make it a download, but will not charge our customers for something that our competitors are allowed to offer for free."

Vielleicht wäre Adobe ja kompromissbereiter, wenn Microsoft einige Milliarden Dollar sofort auf das richtige Konto überweisen würde?

Update: Blog von Brian Jones.

Update: Artikel von Mary Jo Foley in Microsoft Watch.

Update: Artikel der CNet News.