Jeff Key

Well, think of it this way... if you print an Adobe document on Longhorn, it WILL be transformed into a Metro document before it hits the printer. That might be a tad too much conversion going on for me.

It will solve the problem of cross platform compatability for the document space and it will come packaged, out of the box, making it an easy, de-facto choice when working with documents which are intended for a cross platform audience?

Didn't Acrobat solve that problem years ago?

The problem Microsoft has with Adobe having a cross-platform document format and Microsoft not having one.

When I first read about Metro, it seemed that Microsoft was redoing the OS-level print drivers to make that their uniform print file format. In other words, Notepad sends its format to the print driver, which converts to Metro, then to the physical printer format. If it supports Metro, no conversion needed. If it supports PostScript, convert to PostScript. Same situation for Publisher sending its format to the printer, or Word, or Word Perfect, or IE. Most programs have to talk to the OS print driver, Metro is just a change of the low-level format.

So what problem does it solve? Maybe it allows the OS to handle a lot more sophisticated layout for print at the low level than in the past.

It just seems to me that the folks that came up with Metro for low-level stuff also realized that it could be a uniform cross-platform print format. Basic PDF isn't all that capable, so that's a low bar. But will Microsoft put in the bookmarks and security and other advanced Acrobat features? That's the big question right now.

I think it has some promise, just a few years out. Longhorn may not fly off the shelves, but in five years, it will probably dominate the desktop since it will come preinstalled on most new computers.

Now, PDF is a semi-open format, but relying on the blasted Adobe Acrobat or whatever it's been rebranded as nowdays is a pain in the neck. It's another variable - in addition to the OS and browser, there's a special viewer just for PDF files. If Adobe releases an update, tech support desks get calls. I know ours did when Acrobat 6 came out - I think it was something to do with progressive rendering of streamed files, but I don't remember the specifics.

It makes as much sense as adding basic support for compressed files in Windows so everyone could stop pretending to agree with Winzip that they were only evaluating the software every time they opened a compressed file.

I will return to this post in 2010 to mock your short sightedness.