Joseph Scott’s Blog

Scoble is right, MS Office 12 supporting PDF is big. Having the ability to publish to PDF builtin into Office is a good thing. What’s funny about it is that now we get to make fun of Microsoft for doing the right thing. Usually we only get to make fun of them for not doing the right thing :-)

First off, as someone else has already pointed out, it is foolish for MS to limit this feature to just Office. This should be a builtin print feature system wide across all applications, similar to the way Mac OS X has been doing for years. If they wanted to take a short cut there are even a couple of open source apps that implement this, but some how I think a company with that much money in the bank isn’t short on resources.

Aside from the obvious jokes that will pop up about Microsoft coping Apple on this, there will also be jokes about Microsoft coping Open Office for this feature. Open Office has been able to publish in PDF format for awhile now.

If that isn’t enough fuel for the fire, here’s one more. From the announcement by Brian Jones:

I constantly get asked by customers if we can build in this support for publishing documents as PDF files, and now I can thankfully say “yes!” It’s something we’ve been hearing about for years, and earlier in this project we decided that while there were already existing third party tools for doing this, we should do the work to build the functionality natively into the product.

So customers having been requesting this feature “for years”, but Microsoft never acted on those requests. Further down Brian mentions one metric they used to track how much people wanted this feature:

In the case of PDF though, it was a really simple straightforward problem. Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision :-) … Of course we get requests for other formats too, but not nearly to this scale.

In looking at this from the reverse angle it sounds like documentation on how Microsoft has managed to ignore an overwhelming number of customer requests “for years”. Not something that I would really brag about.

Tonight’s big announcement about MS Office turned out to be that the next version of MS Office will default to an XML format. The file extensions are going to change to reflect this; .DOCX (for Word), .XLSX (for Excel) and .PPTX (for Power Point). Scoble has a video interview with Brian Jones about the XML format on Channel 9.

I watched most of the interview with Brian Jones and it seems like MS might actually be doing the right thing with this format. Of course the proof will be in the pudding and I won’t believe it until I see it in a shipping product. The files that Word, Excel and Power Point will produce are actually zip files with several XML files with in it, along with any other pieces that might be imbedded in the document, like an image. So the theory is that these new default formats will actually be smaller than the current binary versions because of zip compression.

This is huge news, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about it. For some reason this announcement feels akin to MS announcing that the year is no longer 2001, which everyone but MS already knows. So what is the big deal? Listening to Scoble and Brian Jones gush about how many new and great things they’ll be able to because the new format stores the document in plain text XML made me want chant Unix, Unix, Unix, Unix. Hello, a good portion of the world has already figured that storing things in plain text when ever possible is a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad MS is taking this step, and it is a big step forward for them. I guess I just expect more from a company that has more resources that many small countries put together. They should have someone there smart enough to push for something like this in MS Office years ago, otherwise what is the point of having $50+ billion in the bank?