This article in PC World gives a perfect example of Microsoft making a stupid decision and a possible insight into the repercussions of an old marketing strategy gone very horribly wrong:
Microsoft's Metro Takes Aim at Adobe
Next version of Windows will include a new document format that rivals Adobe's PostScript and PDF.
The next version of Windows will include a new document format, code-named "Metro," to print and share documents, Microsoft says. Metro appears to rival Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF technologies.
Metro was demonstrated during Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates' keynote at the start of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here on Monday.
The format, based on XML, will be licensed royalty free and 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.
Printers and printer drivers can include support for Metro and deliver better and faster printing results than with today's printing technology, Microsoft says. On stage, a Xerox printer with Metro built in was used to print a sample slide.
The Metro technology is likely to go head-to-head with Adobe's PostScript technology. "It is a potential Adobe killer," says Richard Doherty, research director with The Envisioneering Group in Seaford, New York. "But this is just the first warning shot. Adobe could put something that is even more compelling [on top of] Longhorn."
OK -- first take is WHY? Adobe PDF is in place, has been in place in some iteration since 1991 (when it was debuted at Seybold as IPS - Interchange PostScript). That is almost fifteen years folks.
Adobe did a couple things very right. Although they initially charged waaay too much for the creator and the reader, they "saw the light" and made the reader free and dropped the price of the creator down to a reasonable level. They made it compatible with their fonts which were the best (overall) in the DTP industry. Furthermore, Adobe has been very proactive about making the reader and the tools available on as diverse a platform as possible. It is possible to create a PDF file on an IBM and read it on a MAC or a Linux box.
To their extreme credit, they have been very gracious about third-party disassembling of the PDF format and the creation of other PDF tools. They could have declared the format to be proprietary but they realized that the more use PDF has out there, the more people will eventually buy Adobe product. Finally, the PDF format has a lot more to it than just document creation and reading. I used to work for a large Ocean Engineering and Marine Architecture company before moving to the Farm and one of the reasons they used PDF files was because an Engineer could digitally "sign" a document (a form of public-key encryption) and although someone might be able to hack the document and change the drawing, that act would also break the digital signature.
At the end of the day, PDF works and if something is not broken, don't fix it... What Microsoft is proposing to do with Metro is to make several sweeping changes all of which the market is going to push back against. XML is cool -- I mentioned it in an earlier post today as in "I wish this site was using it" but XML is for open information. Securing it would be a bitch. And finally, Microsoft is asking the printer manufacturers to add a processor for Metro into the Printer (and not using a driver like everyone else). This will require a lot more processing speed in the printer plus more memory. That will meet with a lot of enthusiasm... Plus, how will this printer print photographs? Manage color correction? What happens when you want to print a 30 Meg file onto one sheet of paper and the printer only has 16 Meg of RAM in it? A Printer Driver in the host PC can handle these with aplomb but to ask the printer to do this would be beyond the scope of its operations and I'm not going to even go into the concept of firmware updates...
In the opening paragraph, I said: "...repercussions of an old marketing strategy gone very horribly wrong..." I'm relying on memory here (the MARK-I analog stuff) but when Postscript first came out, Windows 3.11 was king. This was wonderfully described as a "colorful clown suit" for MS-DOS. Bill Gates was developing Win95 and wanted to use a better system for managing typefaces and printing. From what I have heard, Bill met with John (Warnock, co-founder of Adobe) and said basically; Look, let us have the "engine" for PostScript for free plus a basic set of Fonts and you can make your money from selling additional Fonts to our customers. Dr. Warnock said no. Bill then licensed the nascent TrueType technology that Apple had been developing. The problem with this early technology is that something designed on one machine would look quite different on another. Also, the font files were not generally embedded into the document so if someone was using a highly stylized font, brought the file to a printer and didn't include the font file, their document would look very very different much to their hearty dissatisfaction.
Around that time, I ran a business doing printing, copies and DTP so I am fairly familiar with these problems... Much of my work was customer education. With Microsoft's release of Metro (and couldn't they have chosen a better name for this), I'm wondering if Bill isn't trying to stick a thumb in Adobe's eye...
After the printing business, I went to work for Microsoft for five years, had a wonderful time and got to play with some amazing systems (I was a lab manager for large systems working with SQL and Scalability). They had some projects that never saw the light of day that would be incredibly useful to the average developer/sys-admin. They seem these days to be focused on Office / Commerce / Graphics business model and they are ignoring their strengths. Kind of a shame...
