News.com reports that Microsoft recently introduced a product called Metro that analysts haved dubbed as a PDF killer. News.com says, "Metro is designed to do things PDF already does, namely to allow for the creation of files that can be printed, viewed or archived without needing the program that created them." However, people from both Microsoft and Adobe agreed that Adobe's PDF does more than Metro:
With Metro, Microsoft basically wanted to create a file format that would handle two specific tasks. First, the software giant wanted a way to save files from within any Windows program that could then be opened, viewed and shared without needing the specific program that created it. Second, Microsoft wanted to use the same method for sending data to a printer that it uses for displaying data on screen. So Metro uses the same method for describing and understanding graphics and text that Longhorn's Avalon graphics engine uses.
But that is where Metro's ambitions end, Brown said, pointing out that PDF is useful for entirely different kinds of documents, such as multimedia files or electronic forms.
Adobe's Pam Deziel, director of product marketing for the company's Acrobat product line, agreed that PDF offered capabilities far beyond Metro's, describing the Microsoft format as a way to update the current Windows print architecture, which has become "a little long in the tooth."
