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Microsoft Metro Threatens Adobe Acrobat
Brian Livingstone
5/5/2005
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After months of speculation, Microsoft unveiled on April 25 at its Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) details on its new document format code-named Metro. This format is considered by many to be aimed at the heart of Adobe Acrobat, the application that produces PDF files, today's ubiquitous view-and-print standard.
Will Metro really change the way computer users save and print files? And what changes would this require of your company?
I've found that Metro is more than it seems at first glance, and less. Allow me to explain.
The New Print Output For Longhorn
The one thing certain about Metro is that it'll be the new print-output format built into Longhorn, the next version of Windows, which Microsoft now promises to deliver before December 2006. Here's how Metro will work in Longhorn:
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So far, this sounds a lot like PostScript, the page description language that Adobe Systems created as the basis of its platform-independent output technology. Microsoft, however, has big plans for Metro. The new spec is shaping up as not just a print-spooler format, but as a legitimate file format in its own right that the Redmond company will urge companies to use to store all their documents.
A Universal Container for Documents
At WinHEC, Microsoft presenters explained that applications could save documents in Metro format as well as print them in Metro format (to Metro-capable printers). Such documents could be edited by the original application but could also be viewed in and printed by any application that understood Metro, whether or not the app that created the document was available to the user.
This raises the question of compatibility. Will future components of Microsoft Office, say Word for Windows 2007, save documents in Metro format by default? If so, how would older versions of Office applications open, edit, and save such Metro documents?
The answer I received, without being in any way an official response from the Office developers' group, was that applications with proprietary file formats could easily store that format within a Metro file. This would allow the file to remain editable while also making it universal — that is, viewable in and printable from any other Metro-capable application.
Microsoft says the Metro format will be open and free for anyone to license. The company also says it will release Metro upgrades for all versions of Windows "back to XP." This presumably means that XP and Windows 2003 users could upgrade to Metro, but Windows 2000, Me, and 9x users could not. It also seems unlikely that users of Apple, Linux, Unix, and other operating systems would get Metro capability initially, although this could conceivably be developed by third parties.
The Impact Of Metro In Corporations
It's the multiple-format capabilities within Metro that hold the greatest impact for companies large and small. A Metro file essentially is a container for different parts or even versions of a file, such as an editable version and a printable version. In fact, such files are expected by Microsoft to have an extension of .container, not .metro. The multiple-format potential of Metro gives Microsoft some hope of seeing its adoption by corporations as a universal data standard.
To understand this, it's necessary to know how a Metro file is made up:
Why would a business choose to save its documents in Metro format rather than PDF format, or in the format of the original application, such as .doc or .xls? To answer that question, I spoke with officials of Global Graphics, including its vice president of product marketing, Ralph Lloyd.
Content Management Systems for the 21st Century
Global Graphics has been working with Microsoft on the Metro specification since 2003. The Hudson, N.H., firm develops printer technology for many of the largest names in consumer and business output devices.
As Lloyd explains it, Metro files have several advantages over PDF files:
Will these advantages — to the extent that they actually make it into deliverable Metro implementations — be enough to displace PDF from its perch in business today?
Adobe Shows Little Concern Over Metro
Pam Deziel, Adobe's director of product development, disputed in a telephone interview the idea that Metro would have any better text or graphical features than PDF.
"There was nothing I'm aware of that Microsoft announced about Metro that would allow Metro to exceed the graphical capabilities of PDF," Deziel said. She points out that Acrobat 7.0, the current version of Adobe's PDF-creation software, already allows users to create a PDF file that contains an editable version of a document, which is called an "attachment."
Adobe's PDF format required years to work its way into the preeminent role it now plays in the printing industry. In addition, the vast majority of Internet users have installed free versions of the Adobe Reader, which allows them to view and print PDF files from Web sites and other sources. As a result of this deep penetration of the market, PDF files are now accepted by U.S. federal courts for electronic case filings and are used in thousands of other ways by many other organizations.
Except as a print format that speeds up the processing of new output devices, it's hard for me to see Metro — with all its PDF-like functionality — quickly dislodging PostScript from the market.
More information on the new format is available at Microsoft's Metro page.
Brian Livingston is the editor of WindowsSecrets.com and the co-author of "Windows Me Secrets" and nine other books. Send story ideas to him via his contact page. This article originally appeared on EarthWeb's Datamation Web site.
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