Because Adobe pitches a fit about anything MS does to make working with PDF's free. You may not be aware of this but MS Office 2003 was supposed to have the ability to save to PDF builtin-but Adobe threw a huge hissy fit about MS cutting into their markets so MS took it out (there has been an add-on available as a download since it was released-but Adobe insisted the functionality not be included by default)
They make an insane amount of money from the way that enterprises spend hundreds of dollars on Acrobat Professional licenses for every single computer. Sometimes they wise up and implement a baroque license management server where they only have to pay for a fraction of the licenses, but it still costs an insane amount of money.
When it gets used, it's almost exclusively for "Print to PDF". Power Users will use it to combine PDFs, and maybe do some shitty doodling. Occasionally the awful PDF forms functionality gets used, but they usually learn their lesson (easy to make one worse than an MS Access app!)
Based on some similar experiences with a corporate client:
- Purchasing-level decisions have to be approved by someone who worries less about the money being spent now than the situation the company will be in later. In other words, if I offer a free alternative to expensive commercial software, they'll be concerned that even though they'll save a few hundred or thousand dollars now, they'll be hamstrung if I ever leave, or if the free software vanishes.
- These decisions are also often made by individuals who are not all that technically inclined, so they're suspicious of what they see as "amateur" versus "professional" (or commercial, or enterprise) software.
- They're concerned about compatibility with their business partners.
- They find many of the things that we like about the representation of free or open source software -- names like "Mozilla", "Firefox", "Thunderbird", "Foxit Reader", the FreeBSD daemon -- to be amateurish and annoying.
Yes, that leaves the door wide open for startups. However, there's a reason why this tends to be the pattern as businesses go from "startup" to "enterprise".
> Basically the incentives of the typical purchasing department are not well-aligned with the interests of the corporation as a whole.
I don't know about "typical" purchasing departments (or personnel), but in the example I was giving, they actually are working in the interests of the corporation.
My point was that the interests of the corporation -- in this example -- are different from the interests of those who devote more of their time to their computers.
Here's one more anecdote: this same client recently replaced my inexpensive, well-tuned, up-to-date, carefully-configured OpenBSD firewall for their network with an off-the-shelf SonicWall device. That annoyed me, to say the least, and I'm of the opinion that the move has made their network less secure overall. On the other hand, I also realize that now they have a device with a simple, easy-to-understand interface, so when they choose to replace me with a full-time employee, they won't have to worry about whether the employee has any OpenBSD experience. It also guarantees that I'm not hiding any funky backdoors in their firewall, and hey, if there is a network incursion, then they can go after the SonicWall company ... versus not having anyone to catch the fault in the case that the OpenBSD box gets rooted.
I don't want to come across as mean here, but honestly, if someone can't understand why corporations aren't using more open source software, then they don't have much experience with corporations.
I've been using GNU/Linux for so long, I didn't realize until recently that Windows doesn't come with a virtual PDF printer. After a little searching I told some Windows using friends to install doPDF and they seem happy with it.
Wow. I’m not saying anything here, but it's interesting Print to PDF is such a big draw, when OS X's print dialog has included an option to save to PDF (or preview as PDF, or email as PDF, or import to X where X is Evernote, Yojimbo, etc.) for years
Microsoft has had print to Postscript since at least NT4, and would love to include print to PDF. However they know Adobe would kick up a massive legal fuss if they tried (like they did when MS tried to include save as PDF in office 2007). That being said you can easily download save as pdf for Office 2007 from Microsoft's homepage, and there are lots of very nice free print to pdf option available.
Twelve years ago, Microsoft found itself in a courtroom opposite the US Department of Justice for including native internet browsing support. The conclusion of that case was that Microsoft is not allowed to add "products" to their operating system. I think a PDF reader constitutes a product.
And since then, they've included anti-virus software, a firewall, video players and codecs, and so on. I don't see how a PDF reader would be any different than Windows Media Player.
anti virus and firewalls are much closer to basic OS functionality- it's like self defense, but for software. That is much less objectionable than competing with Netscape was, which was the biggest software war of the time (that I know of)
Or, you can look at it from the POV of firewalls and AV is needed to fight flaws in their product. Should they be prohibited from defending their own product, even if it isn't a direct patch => resolution but a prevention?
This is the main thing I dislike about Windows. In OS X I constantly use PDFs: print to PDF, export as PDF, quickly preview PDFs. In Windows those things either require 3rd party software and/or way more time to launch programs.
Only hackers and friends of hackers know about or use Foxit. Everyone should have a lightweight PDF reader, which is what makes the case for the OS handling it so strong.
In osx you get print to pdf, reorder pdf's, remove pages from pdf's, add pages to pdf's, etc... for free out of the box. In addition using skim (3rd party) you get an excellent, fast, opensource, notetaking pdf reader.
Not saying that foxit is not good, I use it all the time in windows, but it is not a full featured free pdf utility.
Use preview.app with the sidebar pulled out and you can just drag and drop pages around. Also you can delete pages from there and add in pages from other preview.app instances. You can also rotate pages from there too.
It's not free, the price is bundled with the hardware. If you pay as much for your windows laptop you can include PDF software in it as part of the cost.
I use Foxit on my Windows partition (and love it) but it isn't quite as fast as highlighting a PDF and hitting spacebar in OS X to bring up Quick Look.
The Skim PDF reader/annotator takes advantage of this (as I understand it). Not having a Mac, I haven't tried it, but when I read about it a year or two ago, I became quite envious.
Interesting that after all this time MS still haven't fixed this bug. I mean, I realize the patch is probably a business agreement rather than some code, but still.
It may of been well known, but anyone that tried to use it would of had to abibe by the license owner's wishes. Which according to other comments was Adobe not wanting it included which meant they couldn't without a lawsuit being introduced.
In most cases, unless a patent applies, if you don't get your information from the licensor (i.e. you create a "clean room" implementation) the official licensor of a format has no say in how you distribute your product. But, with the number of software patents granted accelerating, this approach appears to be less and less viable.
"Heck, you don't even need to build it into the OS. Just make it an optional download such as your Save As PDF add-in for Office."
And:
"Your customers are tired of the exploits and the complications that so many of today's PDF readers include."
The authors are asking Microsoft to write an application that reads PDFs and isn't Adobe Reader. My point is that such an application already exists, is free to download and use, and is both faster and more secure than Adobe's reader.
It does a mediocre job of rendering, and isn't faster than Acrobat if you strip out all of Adobe's lame plugins (we put plugins in your plugins so you can extend while you embrace!)
I didn't know that about Foxit Reader; thanks for sharing. Still, there's no reason, given the author's own requirements, why a PDF reader has to come from Microsoft rather than a competent third party. Granted, Microsoft has gotten better at security in recent years, but they're hardly exemplary at it.
