Two days after Microsoft disclosed its intent to add a PDF export capability to its Office 12 release, pundits were pondering what the move might mean to the growing Microsoft-Adobe Systems rivalry.

Microsoft announced its latest PDF plans over the weekend, on the heels of its Global Most Valuable Professional (MVP) summit. According to Microsoft executives, Microsoft decided to add PDF-export functionality to the version of Office due out late next year at the request of its customers.

"Requests for PDF functionality in Office represent the #2 request when customers interact with our worldwide support organization," said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for Office, in an article on Microsoft's Web site.

Office 12 will output PDF documents compatible with any PDF viewer that supports version 1.4 of the public Adobe PDF specification, Microsoft said. PDF documents created with Office 12 will be able to contain live hyperlinks. Office 12 PDF documents will be accessible to screen readers, the company said. Microsoft SharePoint-related products will be able to index PDF documents for use in enterprise content management scenarios, Microsoft added.

Acknowledging that Microsoft has lagged competitors, such as OpenOffice and Corel WordPerfect Office, with its PDF-export support, some industry watchers nonetheless seemed to have been caught off-guard by Microsoft's PDF play.

"I am surprised by this move," said Rob Helm, director of research with Directions on Microsoft. "It seems to strengthen the role of PDF as a neutral document format, and weaken the role of the binary Office formats. The Office team must have concluded that the binary Office formats have already been fatally weakened."

However, Helm noted, "It's possible that adding PDF will also take some revenue away from Adobe, which has one of the most widely-used PDF add-ons to Office. The two companies are competing more sharply in document management, forms processing, and Web graphics design, so taking away PDF revenue might have made business sense to Microsoft."

Analysts also were of divided opinions about the extent to which the recent decision by the chief information officer of Massachusetts to ban Microsoft Office as an approved document format might have played into Microsoft's plans for PDF support in Office 12.

"If Microsoft compares the two evils before Office — PDF and OpenDocument — Adobe's format is more desirable. PDF is widely used and Adobe is a major, Microsoft development partner.
Microsoft could use PDF as a knife to discourage businesses or governments" from following in Massachusetts' footsteps, said Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox.

Helm agreed that "the state of Massachusetts might have played a role."

"Office could have dropped off a lot of government purchase lists altogether if other governments had followed Massachusetts' lead," Helm said. "Supporting PDF in Office defuses this threat somewhat, since Massachusetts, at least, considers it open enough."

Pundits also were of mixed minds about the extent to which Microsoft's backing of PDF in Office 12 could impact its own "Metro" electronic-paper framework that Microsoft is building into Windows Vista.

Microsoft's decision to include PDF support in Office "appears to be a clear signal that Microsoft understands that PDF isn't going away anytime soon," said Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst with The Burton Group.

Overall, O'Kelly said he didn't consider Microsoft's announcement to be "hugely significant." But "it will certainly simplify things for people who want to output to pdf without paying for a tool in order to do so," he added.

Directions on Microsoft's Helm took a stronger view, regarding the potential impact of Office team's backing of PDF on Metro.

"PDF support in Office could well weaken the appeal of Metro, but it will strengthen the appeal of Office 12," Helm opined. "The Information Worker group that owns Office is not responsible for Metro, and so they might have been reluctant to limit their own feature set to boost Metro."

Microsoft is no doubt weighing its PDF versus Metro positioning, Wilcox said.

"It would appear that Microsoft chose to add PDF support when the competitive format risk would be least and the benefits the greatest. PDF support would come about the same time Microsoft makes available its competing Metro," Wilcox said. "Users would have a choice, but presumably with greater native support for Microsoft's format.

"Similarly," Wilcox added, "while PDF fully supports XML, like Office 12's new XML-based formats, I wouldn't expect Microsoft to fully support all PDF capabilities. So out-of-box experience could actually be better for Microsoft formats."