Sinofsky: I certainly wouldn't say it would be fairly easy. In fact it would be a very substantial undertaking. Frankly, we've had no demand from our customers for this feature.
We get over 120,000 requests every month for PDF support from our Office Online Web site. We chose to announce out PDF support to our MVPs (most valued professionals), a group of power users, writers, trainers consultants, VARs. They've been asking for this feature for a very long time. They were incredibly excited. None of them asked for any other formats in addition to this one.
How important is this movement toward open documents? Massachusetts is one example. Certainly there have been countries overseas that have wanted more openness. How big an issue is that for Microsoft and how are you thinking about that?
Sinofsky: We've always felt that the primary value that we deliver to people is not in the format that the information is stored in but in the tool that's used to create the format. At the same time, what the format does is it affords us a way of delivering scalable, robust secure applications. There are engineering reasons why we invest in different formats over time.
Yet, from a marketplace perspective, we continue to focus on the experience. That's why you see the new user experience in Office 12 as being a really big focus. We think, at the end of the day, that's where customers make their decisions about what's really valuable.
Is there a proprietary value in the formats?
Sinofsky: Generally speaking, we've always had the point of view that the value comes with the tools themselves. The format is a way of representing the features in the product and a way of maintaining the reliability and the robustness.
It used to be that the format was something that you changed every single release and nobody thought about it. Now, what people are saying is, "We don't mind change, we like change, but we want it to have very specific value propositions."
With Office 12, we really focused on (the fact that) we want to open up the format to developers, so you can right code on servers, so you can more easily index and retrieve information from the files. We want it to be more robust... and we wanted the files to get smaller because more and more things are sent over mail attachments where that really matters.
With adding the ability to save Office documents as PDF, it seems like once again Microsoft is going after one of Adobe's cash cows. We've seen a lot of products that seem to be targeting one thing or another that Adobe does. How do you guys view the relationship with Adobe?
Sinofsky: I would certainly not agree with the premise of your question. Adobe publishes the PDF specification as an open standard and encourages developers to implement the output as PDF. They've gone out of their way to tell people, "Please support this format." We're just supporting the format, which is the message that they've given to us. We appreciate the work that they have done to publish the standard just like we have done to publish our Open XML standard...I wouldn't think of this at all as going after Adobe. In fact, it is doing precisely what they have been telling the public, and evangelising to (other software makers) to do.
If documents can be saved as PDF files, why not allow them to be read that way from within Office?
Sinofsky: PDF is by far and away a representation designed to be the printed page, or "as printed." That's predominately the vast majority of usage, well over 99 percent of it on the Web. If you see something centered on the page, in PDF you won't know if that came from a table, if that came from an indented margin, if it came from a style. All of that information is lost when you save it as a printed page, just like when it is printed out to a printer. If you want to have a round trip for editing, that's really why we have invested heavily in the open XML format.
16%
7%
I can barely stop myself from laughing...what, MS reacting to market demands??
Ok folks, now we need 120,000 people to ask for OpenDocument format as well.