Look Out, Acrobat: Microsoft XPS Is on Your Tail

PDF Version

Opinion: Upon further review, the Windows page-rendering technology, formerly known as "Metro," could pose major headaches for Adobe.

Microsoft's upcoming Vista OS and Office 2007 upgrades pose a paradox for PDF people. On the one hand, the company seems to be conceding that PDF is an essential part of the office worker's life. So it built an export-to-PDF feature into Office. That seems to predict PDF proliferation on a scale we've never seen.
On the other hand, there will be "save as XPS" features in Windows applications, too, which will create PDF-like files. Microsoft's new XPS print subsystem (formerly dubbed "Metro"), part of the underpinnings of Vista, certainly stands to cut into PDF usage.

When news of Metro first came out last year, it sounded as if Microsoft was just performing a necessary upgrade. Metro looked like the pit stop a Word file took en route to the printer—stuff happening so far under the Windows hood that the average PC user wouldn't even notice Metro's machinations.

ADVERTISEMENT
I'd heard that Microsoft and Global Graphics—the English PDF and PostScript innovators whose long-lived Harlequin RIP and Jaws PDF software continue to earn solid reps as stable, smart products—demonstrated Metro together at WinHEC in April 2005. So what, I thought at the time, Microsoft's in league with people who know their way around the print-rendering world. Interesting, but let's not sound the death knell for PDF just yet.

It turns out, however, some features in XPS will make its files more PDF-like and less under-the-hood than previously revealed. According to Global Graphics presenters at the AGI Acrobat and PDF Conference in Orlando, Fla., in May, XPS shares some capabilities with PDF: It can support editable metadata, annotations, digital signatures, hyperlinks, bookmarks and text selection, all bread-and-butter features the average person needs in a PDF. Microsoft or its partners will make available free XPS viewers for Windows, Macintosh, Unix, Linux and anywhere else the documents will reach.

XPS, by the way, isn't a Global Graphics product, or even close. It's all Microsoft. The company consulted with Microsoft on developing the file spec, helped develop a prototype RIP, and provided a "print reference implementation RIP for hardware and software vendors to evaluate and measure print performance when developing their applications," according to Global Graphics marketing communications manager Justin Coombes.

PDF is still a much more robust format. Its security features look as if they'll be stronger than XPS rights-management features (remember, with a new Acrobat and Vista coming out later this year, we're still talking rumors and hypotheticals—but the closer it gets to release date, the surer we're getting). Like PDF, XPS will also be an open, published standard, which likely will inspire third-party software development.

PDF supports multimedia and of course, can be made into complex forms—a function that, rumor has it, will kick into overdrive with Flash support in the next Acrobat rev. XPS won't do any of that; in fact, it cannot support any executable code.

So how will the market shake out, once XPS is on everyone's computer? For Adobe, the best-case scenario would be if Microsoft doesn't figure out how to market XPS as well as it did PDF. Today, people working in vertical markets like law, finance, insurance and government can't live without PDF. They didn't arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum.

The second-best outcome would be along the lines of, despite a Herculean effort on the part of Microsoft, the market itself declaring PDF the alpha dog.

This probably will happen—there's no turning back now that many governments have legislated PDF as their electronic document standard: Even if XPS is a better fit, it's me-too, too late. Archivists have their PDF/A standard, prepress their several PDF/X standards, and engineers PDF/E. All are either ISO-approved or headed that way. XPS will have to prove its mettle for years before inspiring such industry support.

Acrobat 8 is suspiciously absent at the AGI Acrobat & PDF Conference. Click here to read more.

It would seem that the best for which Microsoft can hope—even with its wizened marketing army and engineers who likely know the PC user more intimately than anyone else—would be to snap up the low ground. As in, make Acrobat out to be a Cadillac app and PDF a feature-loaded, bandwidth-draining overkill, and persuade the average office user to use XPS instead of PDF when sending a contract cooked up in Word or e-mail attachment for comment and review. Who needs a Cadillac when our Honda Civic, the one that comes free with the operating system, does the job as well?

Redmond's philosophy might be to let the people who are pushing PDF to its limits, such as creative publishing pros, engineers and draftsmen, and multimedia mavens, keep on doing what they're doing in PDF.

That strategy, over time, could marginalize PDF and Acrobat, painting it as an expensive solution only "for the people who need it," whereas right now it's something everybody needs.

At the Orlando conference, Adobe Acrobat Group Product Manager Rick Brown mentioned that there are more than 600 million Reader seats in the world, a change from the previous year's talk of "over a billion downloads." The new number seems more real, more useful—it's good to know how many of those billion Readers kicking around since Acrobat 1.0 actually are in use today.

The number also helps illustrate how Microsoft might be able to go from having XPS, this nonexistent-as-of-yet, non-competitor to PDF to mano a mano combat overnight: Through good marketing, falling into some sheer dumb luck (like the IRS deciding to standardize on PDF for digital forms), and much investment in a free Reader that works on every machine in the world (even cell phones running Symbian) it took Adobe more than a decade to get its 600 million Readers in action.

XPS doesn't need luck. Microsoft estimates it will be on 400 million machines 18 to 24 months after Vista hits the streets, come hell or high water. Then, the battle's joined.

Saludos, GAby Menta

PDFZone