Microsoft to Introduce PDF competitor 'Metro' 798
RustNeverSleeps writes "Computerworld reports that Microsoft will be including a new document format called 'Metro' with Longhorn. Apparently, Metro is intended to be a competitor to Adobe's PDF and Postscript formats. The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML. Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing." Reader gsfprez is less optimistic: "... I noticed the main, and probably most important difference between old and busted PDF and new-hotness Metro (besides the Queer Eye styled name)... 'We will offer products based on this next generation RIP technology and make them available under license to printer manufacturers and software integrators worldwide.' Yes, I can see it now - entire industries undoing their time-tested, battle hardend PDF-based workflows with free and open files all for the chance to use patented, pay-for-use Microsoft proprietary workflows, software, and files. Good luck with that, guys."
Royalty free license (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Royalty free license (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Royalty free license (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Royalty free license (Score:3, Insightful)
MS negotiating tactic with adobe (Score:4, Interesting)
licence your stuff to us and make a bit of money or we will kill your income stream with a new file format killing your PDF RIP & Acrobat
(intresting thing is Acrobat sales account for nearly as much as the whole "creative suite" photoshop et al )
MS are completly unable to produce a decent PDF RIP for windows !
MS want to write PDF's and have been in talks for a year now with adobe I guess it a new level in those "talks"
MS thinks that printer Manufacture's are going to incorperate this and not pay adobe for their RIP and yeah its possible that some low end might do it just witness HP and their printing comunication but HP size & time doing this plus where do they make money...
MS would have to provide these manufacturer's with the software as they are not good at this so MS will do a referance implmentation and those are always great...
welcome Microsoft to the printing world where they are Big Boys
sales are slow
they make alot of money off customer support...
regards
John 'RIP me' Jones
Re:Royalty free license (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Royalty free license (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst thing would be "It's free" for about two years - and then when the market is almost totally switched to this new format it becomes pay.
Re:Royalty free license (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Royalty free license (Score:5, Interesting)
Heh. We keep a Mac in each of the PC labs, because it can open some of the weirder Works files from pc's and then save them in Office format files. So fucking weird.
.met file extension? (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe that's the plan.
Re:.met file extension? (Score:3, Interesting)
Though the problem with blah.jpg.bat is a result of moving from 8.3 filenames to 'long' filenames. If they'ld had, say, 50.3 filenames from way back, this problem might not have happened. Not that they had the space to waste on it.
Re:.met file extension? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:.met file extension? (Score:3, Informative)
Hardly a difficult command to remember once you typed it a few times IMO.
Honestly it's never been that big of a deal to me.
GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:5, Funny)
Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:5, Funny)
Better than my boss; who starts one project and finishes none.
Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I would take the "one project boss" if I got to choose. He only fails one project. The other projects can be delegated to someone else by management.
The million project guy on the other hand obfuscates the resources really needed, which is bad for management because they then start other projects. I bet he also hands out tasks to subordinates and won't listen when they say it is impossible to do with the time allocated, so he makes employees life hell too. So he fails a million projects where some of them might have been saved.
Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:5, Informative)
What a coincidence?
Check out the Winhec keynote [microsoft.com] for even more coincidences. Start about 1 hour and 3 minutes in to get to the Longhorn stuff.
Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GET BACK TO WORK ON LONGHORN (Score:3, Informative)
Or like everything printable on my nearly 20-year-old old Atari ST can be a vector
Metafiles are hardly a new idea (.WMF, Windows MetaFile, anyone?) and Longhorn's rendering subsystem obviously needed some modern way of dumping the data to disk...
Leveraging the desktop monopoly into PDF's turf (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect that an alpha version of "Shorthorn" will get pushed out the door in December just to justify claims that it was ready in 2006. The only way for MS to gain marketshare over PDF would be to leverage their desktop monopoly to break into that new market currently occupied by PDF.
Even if the licensing were just a rubberstamp issue (which it probably isn't) with MS giving the nod till all who request it (which it probably won't), dealing with the paperwork is an unreasonable hurdle and PDF still wins. Publishing is about reaching your audience and that's where a freely available, documented format like PDF comes in. Yes, it's owned by Adobe, but anyone can implement a writer or a reader. Metro fails on that due to licensing restrictions.
Too late? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too late? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too late? (Score:5, Funny)
"Yes, a PDF reader exists....but for the love of god, it's the most bloated, slow, nag-infested document viewers I've ever used, and it only seems to get worse with each version."
Wow, those are pretty strong things to say about Ghostview.
8^)
Re:Too late? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Too late? (Score:5, Informative)
Windows display system is currently based on GDI, so any pdf renderer on windows must read the pdf, and then calculate how to draw the equivelent image using GDI commands, a much slower process. You couldn't port Preview to Windows without also porting Quartz, and then it wouldn't really be Windows anymore.
Windows can render WMF and EMF files really fast because those formats are basically a set of GDI operations streamed to a file.
This Metro format will have the same benifits on Windows as PDF does on OSX, Metro is based on Avalon and XAML, which will be built into Windows as the presentation model.
Re:Too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
Netscape had massive market share before IE was bundled with windows. Bundling with windows can do excellent things to your market share.
Interesting, but flawed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting, but flawed (Score:5, Interesting)
When Metroviewer is shipped with Longhorn and XPSP3, pdf producers will see that they can switch to Metro and the majority if their audience will need no extra software whatsoever. Couple this with the 80/20 rule (about 80 percent of pdf creators use 20 percent of the feature set) then a free beer Metro export bundled with MS Office will seem very attractive to them.
Re:Interesting, but flawed (Score:3)
A quick look at the Acrobat download page:
OS/2
Palm OS (Windows or Mac installer)
PocketPC
SymbianOS
WinXP
WinME
Wi n 98NT
Win98
Win95
Win_3.1
Mac OS X 10.2.8
Mac OS X 10.2.2
Mac OS 9.1
Mac OS 8.6
Mac OS pre_8.6
Mac OS 68K
Linux
Solaris
AIX
Now, is Microsoft aiming to produce readers or authoring for more than a fraction of those systems? I doubt it.
So this isn't a PDF killer.
Re:Too late? (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but there is a big difference: at the time MS included IE in Windows, there weren't THAT many people online. That came after. And all those new people started with IE. In the PDF/Metro case, however, all those people currently online ALREADY use PDF, and have Acrobat Reader installed. Of course, MS will be able to push their own format, but it will only start to bl
Re:Too late? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even bundling it with windows won't affect the academic community because
1) Academics want to share knowledge to absolutely everyone
and
2) All computers can read PDFs, but not all computers use Windows.
Given this, I think that this Metro won't make too much of a splash unless it has support for a very wide range of systems.
So in style now... (Score:4, Funny)
Doing it right... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Royalty-free licensing still allows them to place restrictions. And as for XML, so what? Word documents are in XML format, but the XML only encapsulates a bunch of stuff that's still proprietary and inaccesible. Lastly, the last thing anyone needs is another document format owned by a monopoly.
Re:Doing it right... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason to use a computer is to manipulate and store data. If your data is being held in someone elses proprietary, secret, format then you risk losing your own data.
Or as I like to think of it it's like putting your swag in someone elses safe where you haven't got the key. Fine as long as they "play nicely" but what happens when they suddenly decide you can't have your stuff back without paying an enormous fee ? Or that you now have to pay them large maintenance fees for them to keep storing your stuff ? Or in the worst case where they sell the safe to "a big band gang" who now insist this means they own your stuff too ?
So I think it's a very bad idea. Very bad indeed.
Insisiting on open formats and open standards also means everyone has to compete on a level playing field. This can only encourage developers/companies to focus more on the quality of the software they produce in order to stand out from the competition.
So once again all I can say to Microsoft is "thanks, but no thanks".
And this is why... (Score:3, Insightful)
They spend nearly $4Billion to buy Macromedia, and MS comes out with the half-crap document format??
Honestly now, someone go slap some sense into Adobe, MS will never be able to make even a dent in Adobe's market share.
Re:And this is why... (Score:5, Interesting)
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again. All they need is for metro to be almost as good and then creatively get it on every computer out there. Then everyone will be able to read and edit the document. After Adobe is dead, they can start to charge for a "full featured" document editor and leave simple edits and reading to word(or as a stand alone program). Either way, they can use this to kill adobe pretty damn easily.
It helps when your stuff comes pre-installed. YOu just need to bundle it right to kill off competition.
of course, this is all banking on their ability to come out with a format that is at least almost as good at pdf. But if they do, it will still take a few years to begin unseating Adobe because businesses are slow to change even with incentives.
Re:And this is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd wager a large sum of money that someone was pull a lawsuit at some point. Probably about the same time market share and/or revenue for Adobe from Acrobat type products nose-dives.
Adobe still have some pretty useful products outside of Acrobat. They're not exactly a one-trick pony. (C/f Netscape).
Even IBM survived the non-success of OS/2 aga
Re:And this is why... (Score:3, Informative)
You have remember what PDF is and whats being used to create it.
PDF is an extension of postscript, where is allows to go from creation to distribution in a WYSIWYG format. Most people who need strict WYSIWYG in their documents won't be using any of MS offerings (including publisher) in the first place in creating said documents as it's piss poor at retaining it's layout and formatting.
So maybe your typical office drone who thinks every slideshow is a PowerPoint presentation will us
Re:And this is why... (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype, but no one (or at least, no one important) does Truetype font libraries, Bitstream, Monotye et al all make their fonts type 1 postscript.
Re:And this is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And this is why... (Score:3, Informative)
I guess the target will be the low-end printers, those GDI-based ones that only work with propri
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, they're big, but not that big.
Adobe are greater than just PDF, for a start. There are numerous professional publications that have moved from Quark Xpress to Indesign of late, and they now own all of the following as well:
* Photoshop, the defacto standard for photo editing software.
* Fireworks (as of the last week), the only serious competition Photoshop has for web developers.
* Illustrator, arguably the industry-standard vector graphics package.
* Freehand, one of the major competitors to Illustrator.
* Dreamweaver, the only thing that has come close to a web development IDE/WYSIWYG editor of any sizable distinction or market share. First person to say "Frontpage" gets laughed at long and loud.
And they won't kill PDF, either. Every single professional printer accepts PDF. When I submit adverts to magazines for publication, they go in as PDFs. When I get proofs back, they come as PDF.
People have a lot of money invested in the PDF infrastructure. If they're doing anything serious with publishing, PDF is it. That won't change just because Microsoft give away a free reader with the OS. Many printers and designers use Apple machines or the occasional Sun machine running the hardware, at least over here. Professional printing is a fuck of a lot more complex than just pressing "print" and having the right drivers installed, and the professionals are already over the hurdles of implementing PDF importing and printing on their (extremely expensive) hardware. Why would they switch?
Microsoft haven't a chance of damaging the professional position PDF has. They should be more worried about whether Adobe will bother to implement import facilities in Indesign for their new format. Which I doubt, as Adobe has money invested in SVG and still doesn't have particularly top-notch SVG import in many of their packages. I suspect they'd have to get in the queue.
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if they decide not to support it directly Adobe cannot prevent people from exporting to Metro without also sabotageing their ability to print from the Windows versions of their applications.
Everything that anyone prints from any application will be turned into a metro document by the print spooler.
PDF is A-OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Acrobat Reader, however, is like an eighty year old woman behind the wheel of an otherwise useful and speedy automobile. Why does Preview take a a matter of milliseconds to do what takes Acrobat fifteen seconds or more?
Oh yeah, there's no dobut that Metro is going to be Trusted Computing Friendly.
Re:PDF is A-OK (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think of all the extra things Acrobat has to do.
Re:PDF is A-OK (Score:5, Funny)
Correct except for the "Coming soon:".
Re:PDF is A-OK (Score:3, Informative)
Preview is nice and all, but far from a perfect PDF viewer. It cuts a lot of corners.
Re:PDF is A-OK (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, Acrobat Reader remains very lightweight even today
I also find disabling the Acrobat Reade
Re:PDF is A-OK (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Reader is a fucking trainwreck. (Score:5, Interesting)
More info here [rdpslides.com].
Yet Another Failed Long-Term Strategy (Score:5, Funny)
How about open, free (as in beer) for a change?
that's not "open" (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft seems to have trouble with the concept of "open"; perhaps that's not too surprising, since Sun, traditionally one of the strongest proponents of open systems and formats, has developed trouble in their understanding of "open" as well since they came out with Java.
A pandemic open XML document format already exists (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:that's not "open" (Score:3, Informative)
The PDF format is cumbersome to parse and cumbersome to manipulate; that's why there are few PDF viewers and even fewer PDF editors.
I fully agree that XML doesn't "automatically" make things better, and XML is often misapplied. But for this particular problem, it happens to be a solution to a real problem that the current format (PDF) has.
Another problem with
Re:that's not "open" (Score:4, Funny)
Even cooler, it should be design for use on the internet with features like hyperlinks and embedded objects. That would be cool! And we wouldn't have to worry about different implementations rendering things differently [msdn.com], since it would be an open standard that anyone could implement! We could even use those XML documents to help us mini-applications [apple.com] or even entire UI structures [mozilla.org]. That would be boss!
Someone should really make some XML standards like that.
Re:that's not "open" (Score:3, Informative)
That's Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait...
Adobe (Score:3, Insightful)
And just recently, when Adobe aquired Macromedia [slashdot.org], slashdotters everywhere had to ask: why? [slashdot.org]
One of Adobe's flagship products (bonus points for naming the other), will now be directly threatened by M$, and so it must do its best and diversify.
Re:Adobe (Score:4, Funny)
IntelliDraw? PageMaker? umm.... LiveMotion? wait, wait, it's
Dunno. I give up. [about.com]
It is amazing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because-- (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, PDF is a first-class file format in OS-X, and OpenOffice can create them fairly easily. Building PDF capability into Word must strike Microsoft as being just a little too interoperable.
The format will be open and available for royalty-free licensing, and will be based on XML.
Um, the words "open" and "licensing" are not compatible. Not in my book leastways.
Can we expect Microsoft to do this right? If they do, I think it could be a good thing.
How come? What is there that Metro can do that PDF, or for that matter Word combined with Wordviewer, can't? I guess it would be nice to have OS support for a portable document format, but does Microsoft really have to invent an entirely new format to do that?
Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Reinventing the wheel
b) Taking someone else's idea and repackaging it
c) 100 steps behind what open source is already doing.
d) Inconsequencal to your only major release, Longhorn.
So what if Longhorn introduces a new document format? Within 5 minutes of running it I bet we'll all find something MS could of spent better their time on.
Yawn (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if this will catch on or not, and I don't really care.
What bugs me about this is that MS is the largest software company in the world, with a huge research budget, and one of their best ideas is to come up with an alternative to existing de jure standard. Is this really the best use of R & D resources?
Come on people, there are real and interesting problems to be solved in software development and usability...use your powers for good.
wonderful... (Score:3, Funny)
XML will have performance issues (Score:5, Informative)
PDF is very carefully laid out so that you can perform random access to the document and even download only those parts which you wish to read as you read them.
The offsets are a bit of a nusiance for the code that writes PDF, but aside from that it's a very clean format.
Beyond that, XML encoded documents will be larger. One would think that a gzip type encoding would thrive on the intense repetition in XML tags, but in practice they have a pretty signification impact on compressed file size. PDF is a terse encoding to begin with and supports zipping internally so it is invisible to users, plus the random access still works on the zipped content.
I'm more than willing to assess the merits of the two formats when both of them are real, but for now my money is on the format designed for efficient encoding and access to documents rather than the one designed to use the trending encoding format of the decade.
Royalty free licensing is still licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to pay for MetroReader version 1 or 2, but MetroReader version 3 might not be free, and they also might change the format slightly, and suddenly you're a Word '97 user in a Word 2000 world.
And then guess what? You have to wait for OpenMetro to reverse engineer the format so you can read Metro documents without MetroReader, because Microsoft decided not to freely license the format to Sun Microsystems.
PDF is here, it's open, it works well, it's already integrated into many businesses, and regardless of how much you hate Adobe Reader, the format itself is good. There's no reason to switch.
Graphic Studios? (Score:3, Insightful)
You've got all of these Mac operators, busily using Adobe Indesign and sending print ads out to magazines and newspapers in the required eps or hi-res PDF format (that MUST be generated by original Adobe products for QA purposes). Then along comes Metro and this somehow competes with Adobe.
How? Adobe make no money from Adobe reader and for the creation of PDF's for the non-publishing industry there have been numerous free (gratis) and/or alternative tools for years. Is Microsoft going to create a killer design tool as well? And for the Mac to boot, coz those graphic artists aint going to swap.
No. What will happen is this becomes just another Microsoft feature that no other platform/tool will be able to support and we will have yet another reader that we have to load up...
Oh dear... (Score:3, Funny)
wordperfect vs word , netscape vs ie (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft PR Week (Score:5, Insightful)
I just wonder
Re:Microsoft PR Week (Score:3, Informative)
Already have XML based document format (Score:5, Informative)
There already is an XML based WYSIWYG document format that does everything PDF does and more, the W3C's open standard, SVG.
SVG already works [svgmaker.com] with all Windows programs.
Destroying our naming conventions (Score:3, Interesting)
My guff is the name "Metro"
metro [reference.com]
n : electric underground railway
How about they create their own name for their format that doesn't have to rely on complicating the English dictionary even further.
Since when was an underground train and a bunch of documents the same thing? Windows had some sort of metaphysical relationship, you had little windows. Windows of space, windows of opportunity, windows with things in them. Apple Computers has an Apple (representative of fruit) so that you at least can relate to the word.
I could be preaching to a deaf audience, but I truly believe that linking so many things to single words just starts erroding our language basics. I truly think we could do a far better job of respecting our naming conventions in the real world and actually create naming conventions in the virtual world.
Let me use the Portable Document Format for example. It's called Portable Document Format. Good for that. That's what it is. Very long name, but it makes sense and it is not contradicting the diction rules. "PDF" is fast 3 letters to punch in on the keyboard. Sounds Peedee Eff.
Peedee Eff doesn't exist in English. It's not even English restricted. French sounds "Pay Day Eff". Sure the derivatives do come from the English title "Portable Document Format" but those derivatives ("PDF" spoken) do not intentionally override the language base.
Final line is: Don't let corporations define what your world is. Let your world define what corporations are.
DJVU is probably better & Open Source tools ex (Score:5, Informative)
What it is/does
Info from DJVUZONE [djvuzone.org]:
DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a new image compression technology developed since 1996 at AT&T Labs to solve precisely that problem. DjVu allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web. . . . and white documents. Scanned pages at 300 DPI in full color can be compressed down to 30 to 100KB files from 25MB.. Black-and-white pages at 300 DPI typically occupy 5 to 30KB when compressed. This puts the size of high-quality scanned pages within the realm of an average HTML page (which is typically around 50KB).
How to get it
Viewers are available for Win/Mac/Linux.
The Linux package DJVUlibre [djvuzone.org] allows both viewing and DJVU document creation and is Open Source. It is available for most major Linux distros, source, Solaris, cygwin and may be available for automated installation by whatever method your distro uses.
LizardTech (ABSOLUTELY NO RELATION) provides the free downloadable Mac/Win viewers, and sells Win/Mac DJVU creation tools. (either above URL)
However, there are also free document conversion [djvuzone.org] sites [djvuzone.org], upload various file formats (e.g. PDF, images) and get back .DJVUs.
Check it out.
Re:DJVU is probably better & Open Source tools (Score:4, Interesting)
About 2 years ago, I decided I had too much paper, and that I couldn't find any important papers amoung the bunch. Being a packrat, I decided scanning was the way to go.
I bought a used Fujitsu M3097g+ off ebay for about $100 with document feeder and got started.
I can generate
Using djview I can get it down to around 13-25K. Thats right, like 25-40% the size of a similar PDF (or less). Plus djvu has technology to cleanup fly-specs and noise on pictures to improve compression.
djvu does color, or black and white and conversion is pretty fast. Plus, djvu documents are just a concatenation of complete single files: you can open up, unpack and add, remove or rearrange all the pages in the file. So, I can continuously append pages a larger djvu file over months as I scan them. That is difficult to do with PDF.
And its open source. The free tools will remain free, and there are enough tools available for reading, creating and manipulating files.
it is NOT just a fancy multipage bitmap format (Score:4, Informative)
easiest to quote, I rearranged the text order a bit to highlight the most obvious and important difference.
From What's Inside DJVU [djvuzone.org]
In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of different coder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose an images or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:
BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.
and that's what makes it more than just another compressed bitmap format like .JPG)
DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).
DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).
DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.
and that can really make for small files with big impact. I once downloaded a map document that was a meg or two with DJVU, that decompressed to 100+ megs when I decompressed it into a bitmap. (I think it was the early 1900s map of Yellowstone on the djvuzone site somewhere) The text was sharp and clear in either document... as you know, legible text does not survive high image compression levels well in ordinary bit maps.
Sleeping with the Devil (Score:3, Insightful)
At the time (Mac OSX 10.1) one could have had the distinct impression that Adobe had given up on the Mac platform and was only developing for those die hards in the pre-press and printing industry. And since then, Adobe has brought out new tools, such as that Audio app (ex Cool Edit Pro) which are Windows only. Even Acrobat, that bloated piece of pig fat, ran better on Windows.
Then, it seemed as if Adobe realised that OSX was surprisingly (to them and their utterly clueless marketing staff) making big gains rapidly, and lo and behold, The CS set is much better in its OSX integration.
But what makes me really laugh is that Adobe is suddenly being faced with a major competitor to one of its main cash cows (PDF is used in governments and official papers worldwide), and this by no less than Microsoft which has both the resources and the time to slowly bring printer makers to write drivers for it and to let it slowly gain acceptance. Microsoft is about the only company that can afford to let this Metro thing flop through three versions until it gains traction.
I bet you the people in Mountain View (Adobe), are crapping themselves. This could be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia, in order to have Flash as a barganing chip with MS.
Another battle won (Score:3, Insightful)
MS never supported PDF because they wanted to lock everyone into using Word and its format(s) as the way to pass documents around. Never mind that it was a load of crap for such purposes, quality has never figured in MS's designs and probably never will.
So, now that MS has admitted that the world not only wants, but is using someone else's format (a nice, open format) are they going to get with the mainstream and give their customers what they clearly want? Fuck no. Microsoft didn't get where it is today by listening to customers: customers are there to milk via lock-in. Does the farmer ask the cows when they'd like slaughtered?
Instead they've decided, as usual, to tell the customers what they want: a new, propriety document format to solve all the problems they're currently solving with PDF.
In other words, just like Sparkle, Microsoft's response to the market is to pick another battle it can't win. To win, it would have to be addressing some lack in the current offering that has the potential to create a new market they can exploit, but the only lack is one MS sees: revenue from making portable documents. The rest of the world is already making them and has little interest in the "problem". So, basically, the market for Microsoft's new format is...Microsoft itself. So, who cares?
It's good to see Bill lose one occasionally.
TWW
TrueType vs. Postscript fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
OK...for you kiddies out there; Way back in the 90s, Adobe charged an arm and a leg for Postscript ($1,000/printer) and Postscript fonts were expensive. Apple complained. Microsoft complained. Everyone buying a printer complained or wished for a cheap Postscript printer so !!#@$!$ would look right when they printed. Adobe held firm.
Apple decided along with Microsoft to change part of the problem...Postscript fonts. Jointly, they developed TrueType. Adobe held firm...till it was obvious that Postscript was in danger. Rates fell on Poscript licences, though it was too late and TrueType fonts became dominate.
Adobe retrenched and created the Postscript offshoot PDF...and documents became printable and portable again. Adobe became more involved in the detailed document creation process.
Fast forward to now. Microsoft (by themselves) are attempting to complete the job and take Adobe out of the document creation picture. It's not going to be hard for Microsoft to do it this time. Expect a suite of Metro document editing and processing tools from Microsoft around the time Longhorn is released.
The only gift in this? You now have a year and a half to two years to plan.
Re:TrueType vs. Postscript fonts (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you figure? This time Microsoft isn't competing against an overpriced product and overpriced fonts, and there's no groundswell of anger against PDF.
If anything, the document format that people are hating right now is Microsoft's own Word format.
Proprietary Features (Score:3, Interesting)
PDF is *not* fine (Score:4, Interesting)
For those of us doing real work, many sites are now offering PDF "forms" that allow us to complete an online version of a traditionally printed form. Since the form must look exactly as intended, PDF is ideal for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't always function as designed. Some sites don't support Acrobat 7.0 while others require it, and depending on the HTTP content-type then newer versions of Acrobat will simply reject dynamically generated PDF's (they don't end in
To make matters even more frustrating, the ever-elusive PDF plugin is required. This means if you happen to not be at your computer, the first thing you need to do is install Acrobat Reader. I can assure you that when using a client's PC this is not always possible.
For this particular application, I think there is plenty of room for a new format. If Metro can support the same layout capabilities of PDF, and provide simplified XML representations that can run in a standard browser (Firefox, IE, etc.) without a plugin... Then MS might just be on to something.
Yet another difficulty is the automagical reformatting Acrobat does when you try printing a PDF. If will invariably auto-rotate and shrink-to-fit your document to the page, which is awkward when you are trying to produce something with very tight margins. While Acrobat 7 has addressed this issue, upgrades are not possible for everyone and sometimes you end up cropping pages.
Again... plenty of room for improvement here, especially for pre-press stuff that may need to get tweaked by a printer before a run.
Microsoft Reader Part 2? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the least pleasant eBook reader I have ever used, bar none.
This bodes. This is just so chock full of boding it scares me.
No one has a clue (Score:4, Informative)
A couple people got it right though, the printing industry (not your pos laserjet or kinko's or even you companys fancy $5000 xerox color laser printer) will not give up the billions of dollars invested in creating the "perfect" PDF workflow. While the Formats used (PDF, Postscript, JDF, CiP3|4 and PPF) are all Free to use, the software used to create them isnt.
Not only that, to make the a printed product, you need to make lithographic plates, either from film or directly from PDF (CTP). the imagesetters are run by software from Creo (Prinergy or Brisque) or Rampage rips. HUGE money has gone into the purchasing of this equipment (one imagesetter and a single Prinergy server can set you back well over 100k a YEAR + support fee).
If microsoft wants into this HUGE industry, they need to offer more than just a new file format.
Adobe offers the most complete page creation suit that there is. While many many people use Quark to actually make the page layout placement, everyone used Illustrator to make the postscript files (export page from Quark, import into Illustrator, print to EPS in illustrator, becuase postscript in quark 4 and 5 is broken).
This is a waste of time because it'll get lost in teh sea of slashdot stories...
Re:Good, now we can get rid of Acrobat Reader! (Score:5, Interesting)
Look for PDF Speed Up. Removes the nags, sets all the plugins to optional, turns off the splash screen, kills the ads in the corner, ect.
Acrobat Reader 6.x opens very quick now, and I have yet to have it crash. (By quick I mean in under 3 seconds on my 900mhz, 512mb pc100 sdram win2k machine)
Re:Good, now we can get rid of Acrobat Reader! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:they haven't done anything else right (Score:5, Funny)
Re:they haven't done anything else right (Score:5, Funny)
"The one time Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, it'll probably be a vaccuum cleaner"
Re:they haven't done anything else right (Score:5, Insightful)
If they weren't so underhanded and evil we wouldn't have to deal with their sucky products, because market forces would have either killed them or forced them to not suck.
Re:they haven't done anything else right (Score:5, Insightful)
Slow down, turbo.
The splash screen is displayed before the video driver is loaded, hense the lack of color depth and resolution.
If you're gunna flame, check your facts first.
Re:No problems there (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you look forward to a replacement for Adobe's PDF Reader. PDF the format is wonderful -- just look at it's support on Mac OS X.
The reason government agencies (and many many others) use it is because it's the best, most open, best-supported format of it's kind. There is absolutely no requirement that you use Adobe's software to read or write PDF.
Re:No problems there (Score:3, Interesting)
I totally agree. But this announcement could well fix this. If Adobe feels threatened by Metro and then realises it's really just down to resistance to the bloatware, it could well spur them to make a much leaner, faster PDF reader. Call it "Preview for Windows"... well, perhaps.
Re:No problems there (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Metro (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Same strategy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, but PDF is an open format that they allow anyone to implement independently without requiring them to pay Adobe royalties. I doubt Microsot would be so permissive.
RTFA, fool (Score:3, Informative)
From TFA: "users will be able to open Metro files without a special client. In the demonstration, a Metro file was opened and printed from Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Web browser."
Re:Metro Feature? (Score:4, Informative)