Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Given all of that effort expended by Adobe, it's no wonder PDF is as ubiquitous as it is. And if they expended the same amount of effort on ADE, I'm sure we'd see the same ubiquitousness in... about 20 years.
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I don't think so. I believe what pushed PDF to its market dominance is Microsoft's (and Corel's) fanatic proprietary approach, combined with email attachment limitations that no longer exist.
Businesses that wanted to share documents couldn't just send the Word .doc or .ppt file couldn't count on the receiver being able to open it; having a version that anyone could read and print with free software was a godsend. The fact that PDFs compress better than Word/WP documents (which compress nicely when zipped, but that involves *more* software, and technical actions that a lot of people didn't understand) made them easier to share even when both people had the same word processing software.
PDFs absolutely dominate the business file exchange industry. That's a much more solid hold than the nebulous ebook market. No ebook format is going to replace PDF; it dominates too much of the business and legal worlds.
However, cars dominate the personal transportation world, yet both motorcycles and large trucks are substantial industries. They won't be replaced by cars, no matter how much cheaper or safer cars are. There's plenty of room for other ebook formats, even if PDF continues to be the most ubiquitous filetype for document exchange.