I couldn't believe my ears when I heard on a recent episode of Dot Net Rocks! that Adobe are not going to let Microsoft release Office 2007 with a native 'Save as PDF' feature. This is a feature that I have been desperate to see introduced for years. I have made use of various 3rd party plugins but none have supported all the features I required and been trouble free to use. If MS and Adobe cannot reach agreement the feature will be available as a separate downloadable plugin.

Apparently Adobe want MS to charge more to customers purchasing Office 2007 and to pay a royalty to Adobe, this begs the question... Is Adobe an evil money grabbing corporation?

Adobe may be worried that their sales of PDF authoring software will be affected. I can't really see this happening as 99% of people will buy a $30 plugin to convert their doc's to PDF instead of a $500 Adobe tool.

Adobe's own PDF viewer has been suffering from bloatware syndrome over the last few versions 5.0 - 7.0 and I have read a lot of people saying version 6.0 was brown and smelt funny. I have just started using FoxIT's pdf viewer which is a 1.2 MB download. It is fast to load and feels uber responsive when navigating through documents, it is still early days so I'm not sure how robust it is yet.

I think Adobe need to listen to the humble consumers if they want to enjoy success in the consumer software mass market.