If you ever needed a good argument as to why antitrust law is in practice a very dangerous weapon, then this case should settle it for you. Microsoft is getting in legal trouble with Adobe because the next version of Microsoft Office allows you to export an office document to Adobe's PDF standard. Why are they getting in a spat over this? No one can really grok Adobe's motives other than they are pissed off that Microsoft might co-op their baby. They provide their own Office to PDF conversion tools, and actually, get this, want Microsoft to have to charge for this functionality as a separate product!
So why aren't they going after OpenOffice which makes its own end-run around Adobe's products and allows for a direct conversion to PDF as well? Here's what I think. They're getting increasingly worried that the companies that are implementing PDF are doing it in a way that makes Adobe Acrobat superfluous. When office suites can save directly to PDF, web browsers can save whole web pages to PDF (on OSX this already is easy and standard), who needs a special, expensive conversion tool?
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