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On Mar 26, 2004, at 7:54 AM, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
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At 08:42 AM 3/26/2004, James Plante wrote:Adobe can either wake up and provide the functionality which its customers want, or risk losing those customers to the open source programs. There are already several PDF creation programs available free. It's just a matter of time before those become extended to provide the additional functionality that users want.
Doubtful.
There are both legal and technical hurdles that prevent any 3rd party from implementing a 100% Acrobat compatible PDF-based forms solutions...
To stop any conspiracy theorists out there, I will point out that such hurdles were NOT put there on purpose by Adobe to prevent duplication - just worked out that way...
Leonard
There are technical and legal hurdles to implementing translators for MS Word files, too, but that hasn't stopped the open source community from writing some pretty good ones. Admittedly, they're not perfect. But MS often doesn't translate its own prior-version files accurately, either.
My hope is that Adobe will find a way to offer this capability to their Reader users at an economically affordable cost--preferably <before> they get supplanted by an open source solution rather than in reaction to one. They make a good product, and Acrobat (full) just keeps getting better, despite our complaints and gripes.
So far, this capability is offered only to large institutions with deep pockets and complex networks. They need a low-volume grass-roots solution, one they can make money with on a volume basis. Three institutions at $50K ea = $150K. Three million individuals at $10/ea = $30,000,000! Small change? Face it: $40 a copy didn't work well with Approval, so sales are low. So reduce the price. Sell it! It's all profit now. A bank with 3,000 seats isn't going to pay $120,000 for 3000 copies of Approval, but they might bite for $60K. Let the price be somewhat less than the functional utility offered, because the goal of any institution (including Adobe) is to add to the bottom line.
Jim Plante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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