PDF and Phishing

By James Gaskin, NetworkWorld.com, 06/02/06

It's a shame when big corporations with big legal staffs stop improvements that could help the rest of us. That appears to be the situation as Adobe's lawyers and Microsoft's lawyers can't figure out a way to allow Office 2007 to create PDF (Portable Document Format) files automatically. One story, or actually a Report: Microsoft expects anti-trust suit from Adobe, says the lawyers are twitching in their legal briefs with excitement. Other stories say flat out the Microsoft has agreed to pull PDF support already.

I don't know the legal details of the patents Adobe accuses Microsoft of violating, or why Microsoft won't license the technology from Adobe. But making it easier for people to save documents as PDF files keeps them from saving the files in Microsoft's Word .DOC format, which is proprietary and insecure. Now Microsoft has another good reason to throw their hands up and say how they've tried to work with non-proprietary formats (or at least proprietary formats they don't control) and they've been blocked.

But this is curious: OpenOffice, the free office suite that compares quite favorably to Microsoft Office, can create PDF files. I know the current version can do so, and I believe the previous version did as well. So the open source programmers are smarter than the Microsoft programmers? There must be more to this story, but since the lawyers jumped in we'll probably never hear it.

This legal mess also gives Microsoft someone else to point fingers at about the Vista operating system delays. Of course, one might point out that Microsoft should know better than trample patents, since they get so upset when people trample their patents, but that would sound too much like "I told you so."

Phishing stories and exploits get more and more bizarre. Now we have to worry about Phishing in MySpace.com for identity theft. Maybe we'll get lucky and the phishers will trap identities of the perverts trolling around MySpace and turn them in for us. And the MySpace folks may be happy to see headlines about their service that don’t include the word "pervert" but I just ruined that, didn’t I?

I just returned from lovely and warm (OK, hot) Phoenix and the first-ever QuickBooks Enterprise user conference. I'll follow up with some details soon in one of the regular newsletters, but I have to say I was impressed with the Intuit people's excitement at meeting their customers, and even more surprised at the customer excitement and their fondness for QuickBooks Enterprise. The theme was "Prepare to Grow" and the keynote speeches offered more help than I've seen from other conferences for other vendors.

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