To: jvncnet!usa.net!bskeet@dowv
cc: Rex Ballard 
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On Mon, 24 Oct 1994 jvncnet!usa.net!bskeet@dowv wrote:

> Rex,
> 
> There is a version of Adobe Acrobat for Mac, Windows, Unix and DOS.  I'm
> wondering if you've had an opportunity to play with Acrobat at all.  There
I have had limited access to Acrobat.  It is a nice product.  That isn't
the issue.

Fastback is much better than pkzip, you rarely find apps distributed
(online or otherwise) in fastback format.  Laplink is a great file
transfer program, but xmodem, ymodem, or zmodem is the usual mode of
transfer.  NetWare is much easier to administer than TCP/IP, but TCP/IP is
the protocol used on the internet.  Why?

Quite simply, zip source code is available.  It has been ported to unix,
mac, dos, and even cp/m.  Xmodem, ymodem, zmodem are also available, in
source, I don't have to know about the server.  TCP/IP is available in
source code and can be ported to everything from a TRS-80 to an ES-9000 on
MVS.  Mosaic, and the underlying servers, along with other www browsers
are available in source, for the machines on the net.

We will be cutting over from 16bit windows applications to 32 bit apps,
and still grandfathering 80286 windows 3.0 machines (disgusting isn't it).
And users who don't want to spring $1000 for 32meg of memory may be
shopping for unix rather than switching to Windows-NT, especially since
most unix variants can run in 4-8 meg.

Attempts to "corner the market" in a "must have" application are
automatically the first target of hobbyists, systems administrators
looking to shave a few years salery off the royalties budget, and
end-users who would rather download inferior software than spend 30 hours
pushing and justifying the "premium product" to the procurement people.

Microsoft Word is a great Document prep system, but half my internet
customers are on Suns.  It's rude to tell them they need to buy a $400
editor to read my 30 page document.  I forgot to mention the $1200 PC they
will need to run the viewer.  Instead, I send them a Postscript document
and let them print it on their Adobe equipped Laser Printer.  Thank you
adobe for making the xxx to postscript converters and drivers.

The issue here is one of infrastructure.  The internet grows at
exponential rates because of the open infrastructure.  Vendors who attempt
to corner that market will find that the infrastructure and the economics
of the internet are quite formidible.

> isn't any server software that accompanies the reader as you have alluded.
In the case of acrobat, we're talking the origination system.  If Adobe
were as agressive about creating free/pd PDF drivers as they were about
creating free/pd Postscript drivers, they could be big contenders.  Adobe
made their money on the printer driver software, the ROMs used to drive
underlying postscript printer engine.  Postscript was similar to FORTH,
which was very effective in imbedded applications.   Adobe will want to
make money somehow.  They can make it on the core viewer, the core driver,
the media (collect $$ from publishers), or from "High Gloss Applications"
based on the infrastructure.

I repeat what I've said all along.  If Adobe is willing to put their
infrastructure source code under General Public License, and let me
download it through public archive sources, I could easily support them.
The alternatives are things such as SGML, JPEG, and MHEG.  All of which
meet the guidelines stated in this paragraph.

The "High gloss" is where the big money is anyway.  Spry is selling
internet in a box.  A user could download the whole package, but for $140,
he's got better things to do with his time.  For 200 users, I could either
buy bulk or spend $28,000 on staff/support in-house.

> Fonts can be embedded in a document, but that doesn't mean they have to be
> there.  And they take up relatively little space on a large document (like
> in a 500k document, about 10 or so embedded fonts might take 20 - 40k.)
> So, it's not like those fonts are being downloaded---just information about
> the font so that it can be rendered accurately by ATM.  The font cannot be
> separated from the PDF file and used, and I'm not certain that the font
> information for all of the characters is put into the file.

It isn't that much different from postscript.  Yes, if I'm willing to use
the bundled fonts (scalable of course), I can have a very small document. 
When I add a few custom fonts, "prologs" and new definitions, the whole
system starts to get wierd.  Apple had a proprietary prolog that meant you
could only use apple's printer (later, apple made the prolog available for
other printers).  Postscript 3.0 will kill a Ghostscript viewer today.

> Plus, there is some new technology coming that may make the font embedding
> a mute point.
Oh goody, 2 million Acrobat viewers out there and NOW we're going to
render them all useless so we have to buy the $100/copy version.  Oh, I
forgot about the $50 upgrade package for those who already have $400
TCP/IP with MOSAIC packages.  I've seen this a few hundred times in the
last few years.

 
> Bill
> *********************
> Bill Skeet
> Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab
> Boulder, CO  80302
> 303-443-3312

	Rex Ballard
	Dow Jones
	(personal posting)
 



From rexb Thu Oct 27 18:46:57 1994