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Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
When Microsoft got threatened by a lawsuit from Adobe in June this year, the Redmond company walked the Buddhist way and removed PDF export from Office 2007. But since it would've been a shame to dump the already written code, the company now decided to release a free add-on which brings back the functionality to export and save to the PDF and XPS formats.
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Adobe's own statement suggests that they worried that Microsoft would undermine PDF in some way. I suspect that means they believed MS had plans to 'embrace and extend' PDF in Office, and then introduce a PDF reader (or similar software) that would do such MS-extended PDF, so that Office-produced PDF files containing such extensions would be somewhat incompatible with the rest of the PDF world, and make the world go to MS rather than Adobe when they wanted PDF. It's an unpleasant scenario for Adobe.
In that case, releasing the support as add-on won't change anything. I suspect this is Microsoft's way of telling Adobe that there has been no hanky-panky -- embraced but not extended. Though I can't figure out why unextended PDF support should have been removed in the first place ... .
Added later: I've just found
the following piece of analysis which quotes from Adobe's SEC filings, which suggests that it's more to this than just a lets-keep-the-standard-clean measure.