One of the nicest features of the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007 is the ability to save files from any Office program to PDF format natively. I've been using this feature in the current beta version of Office 2007 and it works great. This is one of those things that a lot of our Clients have been asking for over the last couple of years. Last week Microsoft announced that it is removing this feature from Office 2007 due to a threatened lawsuit by Adobe, the owners of the PDF technologies.
Adobe has stated in the past that the PDF format is open. This means that anyone can utilize the standard to create PDF content. I guess that means anyone except Microsoft or anyone else that Adobe may feel threatened by. Microsoft has said that they will remove the feature but offer it as a free download. Adobe wants Microsoft to charge for the download, presumably to ride the coattails of the extremely popular Office product.
This doesn't speak well for Adobe. Going back on public statements is never a good thing. There are several free programs on the Internet that allow you to print to PDF. Why hasn't Adobe gone after them? Perhaps they will now.
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