Yesterday Adobe announced that it will release control of the PDF document format standard to AIIM for submission to ISO. I imagine this decision has been brewing for a long time, and would have been very difficult to reach. PDF is already the de facto standard for portable documents, but with Microsoft ‘owning’ the desktop productivity market and the new release of Office 2007 today, there would have been a good chance of the PDF format dying out if it remained proprietary.

With PDF as an open standard we should see the rate of adoption continue, if not increase. But if you’re Adobe, so what? By releasing control of the document format Adobe can no longer rely on royalty income, and seems to be placing all its PDF eggs in the Acrobat basket – hoping to make money from selling the PDF creation tool. Whether it can stand up against Microsoft here remains to be seen. However, faced with the possibility of Microsoft using its monopoly to kill the PDF standard this seems to be the lesser evil.

In any case Adobe had a good run with PDF, keeping it proprietary for quite some time and likely banking significant dollars. And Adobe is building a nice empire with its creative suite now integrating Macromedia products, so I’m sure they’ll do fine in the ‘creative’ market where Microsoft poses no threat at all.