Why Metro will not kill PDF

If you are following the news you’ve likely noticed claims that "Metro", Microsoft's new file format for electronic document printing/handling, will derail Adobe's PDF into obscurity are quickly being met by counterviews that say otherwise.  While you may not want to take to heart what the two companies say as they downplay the competition, experts and analysts point out the challenges facing Metro.

For instance, Jupiter's research analyst, Michael Gartenberg, brings up Adobe's longstanding presence in the market: "Once again we are talking about something that Microsoft is planning to do versus something that is existing and shipping in the market and currently in its seventh revision…it's a fairly daunting task for them." IDC mirrors this argument in a recent comprehensive overview of Metro. According to the firm "Microsoft will have a difficult time overcoming the fifteen years of PDF development, innovation, and learning accumulated by Adobe around documents and document workflows, and the three quarters of a billion desktops that already use Acrobat or the free Acrobat reader to exchange documents across platforms."

IDC also dings Microsoft for making the new file format compatible only with certain Windows platforms and calls on the software giant to make it platform-neutral: "Unless or until Microsoft or some third-party develops a "Metro" viewer for Apple machines and other operating systems, "Metro" will not fulfill this cross-platform document workflow vision." 

Another challenge will be getting software and hardware vendors to join the party. In his column, David Morgenstern says that "PDF and PostScript are more than technologies. Rather, they are longstanding content software platforms used by professional content creators, publishers as well as enterprise and consumers." Therefore, Microsoft may have to wait a long time before Metro printing gains traction with customers so that printer vendors will be willing to invest in new printer controllers. (A recent post on Slashdot points out the magnitude of this specific challenge rather well.)

In the meantime, Adobe should not concern itself with Metro in the short term and instead figure out how to take what it gained from the Macromedia acquisition to create the next generation of multi-media tools, a battleground more worthy for Microsoft.