Adobe is finally talking about its threatened suit vs. Microsoft regarding PDF writing support in Office 2007, and Microsoft’s new electronic document format, XPS. Of course, they’re talking anti-trust and Monopoly, having taken a page from Sun’s strategy in their lawsuits against Microsoft. Several thoughts come to mind:
1. The Justice Department should examine Adobe for anti-trust. After all, based upon Judge Penfield Jackson’s sliding scale approach to Monopolies (Microsoft has a Monopoly on OS’s running on computers able to run Microsoft software, the other computers, like Mac’s and Mainframes, and Unix machines don’t count), Adobe has a monopoly on PDF technology (it’s the ONLY electronic document format, and they own it).
2. Adobe should remember what happened to Sun: after winning their suit, and getting Microsoft to agree to remove Java from their OS’s, they had to go back and get Microsoft to agree to leave in their JVM to prevent Java usage from imploding since very few computer vendors seemed interested in shipping Windows with Sun’s (or anyone else’s) JVM pre-installed.
3. Microsoft also did a job on Sun by placing the C# language definition under the control of ECMA. What happens if they do the same thing for XPS? Just how does Adobe sue Microsoft for implementing an ECMA standard?
Adobe could find its core technology undermined in a big way if it tries to play hardball over this. Remember Ashton-Tate and Dbase: they sued Borland for copyright infringement and instead, wound up losing their own copyright over the database language.
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