Adobe vs. Microsoft II: Users Lose

Sonia’s pointed post earlier today spurred my thoughts on Adobe’s efforts to sic the European antitrust squad on Microsoft to keep PDF generation out of Office. But rather than argue over Microsoft’s position as a monopolist, I’m inclined to look towards the consumer surplus destroyed here by competition law.

(But first, I should add a new update: in response to Adobe’s threatened legal action, Microsoft agreed to yank PDF features from Office.)

Many Windows users need to generate a PDF from time to time–probably not enough to justify purchasing Acrobat. And so they rely on friends and colleagues to translate their files, a process that can run into all sorts of problems (e.g., fonts, formatting, metadata, etc.) and is annoying for everyone involved. (Trust me.)

Apple addressed this need nicely–any user can print a PDF from any application in Mac OS X. (I should note that Apple’s implementation of this feature is far, far different from Microsoft’s, in that OS X’s graphics system is based on PDF. I’m not sure that this matters.) Since the mass adoption of OS X, I’ve seen a lot more PDF files coming from Mac users. For most of these users, Acrobat–which is stuffed with useless, annoying, and puzzling features as badly as any Microsoft application–is just overkill. But a low-cost way to generate PDFs is really attractive and proves to be really useful–far more so, I suspect, than most users imagined initially.

This is, essentially, the sort of feature that Microsoft aimed to bring to its Office suite. Until, that is, Adobe threatened legal action, exploiting Microsoft’s (one-time?) status as a monopolist. (What kind of legal action? According to one report, “It’s unclear whether that action would be in the form of a complaint to the European Union or a formal antitrust suit.”)

A cynical person might say that Adobe is keen to protect its monopoly in PDF generation on the Windows platform. After all, for a consumer who doesn’t need all the whiz-bang features of Acrobat, $0 compares very well to $150+. (There is the Ghostscript-based PDF Creator application, which is free, but it is, in my experience, buggy, unreliable, and extremely subject to software entropy.)

At the moment, Adobe has a lock on this market and it shows. Acrobat 6 and 7, for example, are almost as bad as Word 6 on the Mac a decade ago, and innovative features have been few and far between in recent releases of Acrobat Reader and Standard–which nonetheless continue to bloat to impressive levels. (Acrobat Reader 7 on my computer is 101 MBs, about twice the size of my web browser and email client combined.) Instead, Adobe has focused its development energies on the high end of the market, pre-press and other areas in publishing, and to great success. This does nothing, though, for regular users, who don’t need to do…whatever it is that prepress folks do with their thousand-dollar copies of Acrobat. Competition at the low-end of the market would be a good thing, for consumers anyway. We could use some price competition and better software.

I’m not going to say that Adobe is being shortsighted and that, in the end, PDF-generation capabilities in Office could lead to increased sales of Acrobat as users look to ‘move up.’ I assume that Adobe recognizes its interests better than I do and that it expects to lose piles of money if Microsoft embraces (and extends?) PDF.

But so what? Is that how competition is supposed to work? And isn’t competition what antitrust is supposed to protect?

Yes, and that’s exactly why Adobe is running to the antitrust authorities, which in Europe are only too happy to do its dirty work.

SHARE: