Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I suspect that corporate interest is low, budgets have been slashed, and this was the best they could do with the resources at hand.
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This was a far more ambitious release than normal. It's a massive update to personal documents service, with completely new use cases (annotation workflow and notebook), on top of new hardware. New platforms, essentially. It wasn't that long ago that it seemed Kindle was on life support.
Now I'm wondering: what got into them?
They surely had more budget but it's a lot more work than just another new Kindle, it's building out these new platforms and exploring new use cases. Scribe is just the first step.
So it is part of the plan to get this in people's hands and get feedback, rather than build out features nobody will use.
Internally it seems they review Word documents and Microsoft is across the street more or less, so that's why that is a focus. But they can't ignore PDF as that's widely used elsewhere. So that will develop more slowly I think.
Ultimately I think the goal is to export a PDF that looks like the one that came in, with the annotations appropriately PDF standard. Probably they're working with a partner on that (FoxIt or Adobe) since it's not a competency they really need in-house any more than they need Word developers.
And Print Replica is completely adequate as a lightweight proxy for PDF. And they'll be full citizens as personal documents (reading position and markup synced), similar feature set on iOS and Android eventually.
It's unfinished but I like where it is headed.
I could be dreaming though.