In an unfortunate turn of events, Adobe has threatened an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in Europe. That two American companies may have their fate decided by European bureaucrats is bad enough, but the underlying assumptions make it even worse.The dispute centers on two issues. First, Microsoft announced that it was adding a “save as PDF” option to its Office 2007 offering, but Adobe doesn’t want that to happen. If Microsoft does offer the functionality, Adobe has demanded that it be a separate download for which Microsoft charges its customers.
Adobe’s insistence that Microsoft inconvenience and gouge its customers is odd given that PDF is billed as an “open standard” and, according to Adobe’s own Web site, 1,800 vendors including Apple and Sun Microsystems offer the PDF functionality at no cost. One could view Adobe’s actions in this case as a plan to force Microsoft into acting like a monopolist that is unresponsive and expensive. That’s a sticky position for Adobe if it plans to argue that Microsoft is a monopoly.
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