July 31st, 2007
Many of you will have by now heard of Adobe’s great gaffe in the Acrobat 8.1 of licensing FedEx/Kinko’s to add a little button to the Acrobat toolbar making in a no-brainer for users to send their output files to that large and well-respected chain of, dare I say it, “quick printers” The button can easily be removed through the options menu, but you’re still stuck in the File menu with the same “feature,” which Adobe admits can only be removed with more extensive system surgery (for example, in Windows, using resedit).
Adobe has a proud and essentially unassailable history as a non-partisan vendor (at least in matters resembling this). It’s a great company. When I first got requests from the press about the story I said: “Forget it. It’s a tempest in a teapot. Someone made a big mistake, and Adobe will fix it.”
Sadly (for Adobe) the press moves more rapidly than Adobe does, and the company did not fix the problem quickly (most likely having a lot to do with the agreement somebody signed with FedEx/Kinkos) and today the story hit the Wall Street Journal, of all places.
There are printing industry associations calling for bloodletting, and no end of commentators looking for more.
This will pass like a summer’s storm. Forget about it!