[_b8r0]

This would be quite interesting. If Microsoft bought Adobe, what would happen to PDF on Mac? What would happen to Silverlight? Would the next Office use PDF as a standard format?

Then there's the creative suite. What would happen to photoshop? Dreamweaver (or MS Frontpage 2012 as it'd be renamed)? InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher 2012 as it'd be called)?

Also think about the other side of it. The Acrobat team would be forced to actually secure their reader instead of relying on researchers to do it for them.

I think this can only be a good thing(tm). As Dan Kaminsky once said, "What could possibly go wrong?"

[dsspence]

Apple doesn't license PDF from Adobe even though it is part of OS X's native graphics renderer.

“The Quartz renderer and the PDF interpreter that Apple ships with Mac OS X are built with Apple code, with no external licenses, by Apple employees. Adobe just publishes a specification for how it’s supposed to function. This gives Apple considerably more flexibility with regard to what Quartz and the PDF interpreter can be used for.”

http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/osx_quartz

[protomyth]

Steve Jobs learned from his experience with Adobe and the licensed version of Display Postscript. (see footnote 1 http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus )

[_b8r0]

Thanks to you and the parent commenter for a very insightful response.

[emilsedgh]

PDF has an open spec and third party developers could make as many PDF readers as they want. Like on Linux, where there are plenty of PDF readers, mostly based on Poppler. I guess there must be non-Adobe PDF readers for mac.

[andrewf]

"Preview" is part of Mac OS X and works well enough that third party viewers aren't popular.

[austinalter]

I don't think Microsoft is too eager to have another run-in with the FTC.

[CamperBob]

The only way that would happen is if Adobe went crying to the FTC... which they would, which is why Apple offers first-class PDF support in the OS and Microsoft doesn't.

An Adobe acquisition would render this a moot point. Full .PDF support would show up in Windows very quickly, which wouldn't be a bad thing IMO.