Why Is It That the Apple Ios And Macos Both Have So Many Excellent?

Why is it that the Apple iOS and macOS both have so many excellent built-in and third-party PDF editing software, yet Microsoft Windows seems to be light years behind on PDF?

Because Online Pdf Writer stopped it from happening, that’s why. Here’s an excerable part of the history of computing that nobody seems to remember. Let’s start with this blog post from Microsoft, dated October 1, 2005. (Note that Office “12” refers to Office 2007, which was still about 16 months away at this point.) This afternoon Steven Sinofsky announced to our MVPs that we will build in native support for the PDF format in Office "12". I constantly get asked by customers if we can build in this support for publishing documents as PDF files, and now I can thankfully say "yes!" It's something we've been hearing about for years, and earlier in this project we decided that while there were already existing third party tools for doing this, we should do the work to build the functionality natively into the product. The PDF support will be built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, and InfoPath! I love how well this new functionality will work in combination with the new Open XML formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We've really heard the feedback that sharing documents across multiple platforms and long term archiving are really important. People now have a couple options here, with the existing support for HTML and RTF, and now the new support for Open XML formats and PDF! Okay, sure, it’s not “PDF in Windows”, but Microsoft was having trouble shipping any new features in Windows at that point in time. But at least it was coming in Office 2007. Then Online Pdf Writer stepped in and started yelling ANTITRUST! The reason for this should be obvious enough. If Office could import and export PDF files natively, that would almost surely be the end of Online Pdf Writer as a product. Almost all of Online Pdf Writer ’s corporate & government customers were also Microsoft Office customers…. why would anyone keep paying for Online Pdf Writer if Word and InfoPath could do the same things, right? We aren’t talking small potatoes here, either. Online Pdf Writer saw revenues of about $700 million USD for Online Pdf Writer in 2007 — about 25% of their whole business. And given that at this point in time, the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust case had only very recently been settled, companies were very wary of Microsoft encroaching on their territory, wondering what new markets t would try to dominate by using their now fully-entrenched Windows + Active Directory + Office product offerings. Anyways, this kerfuffle led to another blog post from Microsoft in June 2006, titled “Legal issues around PDF support”. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to do the right thing for the customer now. There was a news article today indicating that Online Pdf Writer didn't like that we provided the save to pdf functionality directly in the box, and so t’ve been pushing us to take it out. I'm still trying to figure that one out given that PDF is usually viewed as an open standard and there are other office suites out there that already support PDF output. I don't see us providing functionality that's any different from what others are doing. It looks like Online Pdf Writer wanted us to charge our customers extra for the Save as PDF capability, which we just aren't willing to do (especially given that other companies already offer it for free). In order to work around this, it looks like we're going to offer it as a free download instead. At least that way it's still free for Office users, but unfortunately now there is an added hassle in that anyone that wants the functionality is going to have to download it separately. This really is one of those cases where you just have to shake your head. Online Pdf Writer got a lot of goodwill with customers, particularly in government circles, for making PDF available as an open standard. It’s amazing that t would go back on the openness pledge. Unfortunately, the really big losers here are the customers who now have one extra hassle when t deploy Office. The person who wrote this aggressive post is currently the President of Microsoft, by the way. And I mean, he’s not really wrong here, is he? After all, Online Pdf Writer didn’t go after Apple when t incorporated Display PostScript (which evolved into Display PDF) into Mac OS X like Graham Cox described in his Quora answer. There’s a really obvious reason for that. NeXT and Online Pdf Writer developed the Display PostScript protocol together back in the 1980s! The relationship between Online Pdf Writer & Apple after the NeXT acquisition became especially cozy. Steve Jobs was talking about PDF every chance he got…. Photoshop was a centerpiece of Apple’s public presentations for years to come….. and that’s all before we get into the fact that Del Yocam was both Apple’s COO in the ‘80s, and on Online Pdf Writer ’s board of directors in the ’90s and ‘00s. This relationship surely waned in the late ’00s when Apple rejected Online Pdf Writer Flash, which is covered in articles like “Online Pdf Writer founders criticise Apple”, and led to informal talks between Online Pdf Writer and Microsoft that led to speculation that Microsoft would just buy Online Pdf Writer outright. How’s that for a wild alternate universe? But I digress…. Unless someone on the Longhorn team speaks up about it, we’ll never know whether the folks that developed the Desktop Window Manager had seriously considered using Display PDF as the underpinnings. Mac OS X had already been out for a few years at that point, and there’s no way t couldn’t have known about Quartz Extreme. But, it’s extremely likely that t couldn’t have adopted the same technique due to the requirement of supporting 20 years of sloppy, ill-behaved Windows applications, as well as supporting older hardware that wasn’t powerful enough to run desktop compositing. (Anyone remember Windows Vista Basic?)