Microsoft/Adobe Update- The customers lose again…

BetaNews: "Amid threats of a lawsuit from Adobe, Microsoft acknowledged Friday that it would remove support for saving files in PDF from Office 2007, as well as dropping its own rival format XPS from the productivity suite and Windows Vista. The changes follow a breakdown of talks between the two technology giants after Microsoft announced last year it would include native PDF publishing with the release of Office 2007."

The loser here is the customer who wanted the ability to produce a PDF to share their content with other people. This is so frustrating that I can't even articulate a response that doesn't seem like a rant, so I'm not going to try. This is a rant. And I'm angry that this functionality (which has been on the product roadmap for the entire lifecycle of O12) is the victim of a legal skirmish. What's worse is that I know customers were looking at building significant portions of their process in document management around this capability, and now it will be gone. I wish that the customers could just get the software that they want without all of this hassle.