Microsoft XPS vs. Adobe PDF

It appears that Microsoft is officially entering the portable document market, as screenshots of the XPS save-file dialog appear on the net. The XPS format-previously-know-as-"Metro" makes use of a zip container with XML file content, and is intended to compete directly with Adobe's PDF file format. You can find out more about the XPS (or "XML Paper Specification") here.

XPS appears to address several inefficiencies with the popular PDF portable document format, such as reducing file size and creating an XML-based structure. I still have to ask, however:

"Microsoft, why?"

I believe their XPS format will not penetrate beyond 2% of the portable document market, and here's why:

• The PDF format portable document is ubiquitous. It's already the de-facto standard for academia and business alike. It's easy to use, make, and view. Of course, I am coming from an academic perspective on this, but I'd wager that more than 60% of the PDFs circulated daily on the net are from scientific and professional journals, like Science, Nature, Cell, and about 500 more that show up yearly on the impact-factor rankings. Whenever someone publishes a paper, review, news-brief, or article in one of these, it's converted to a PDF format. The magazine Science likely circulates over 50,000 PDFs in a day, conservatively (the actual figure may be more than 10 times that amount). That's just one journal! Science has an expensive infrastructure it's worked on for years to hone the production and information dissemination process, a significant investment in time and funds. To believe that a new format will simply sweep over a previously entrenched one is folly, even from a company that owns the principle market-share for operating system. For a magazine like Science to replace this infrastructure is just not a feasible option. The submissions processes for the major journals generally entail submitting PDF formatted documents, as well. The journals' heuristics then tease out the essential bits of info (like author, date, title, and abstract) and do some basic pre-formatting before presentation before the editors, and before being parcelled out to peer-reviewers. This is an automated process performed directly upon the PDF upon submission, and is a part of the costly infrastructure in place to facilitate a paperless process for the manuscripts submitted. XPS simply can't begin to compete with the well-established PDF format.

• XPS isn't a vast improvement over the PDF format. If it were dramatically smaller, easier to parse, easier to send, easier to make or use, it might present a contender against PDF. However, the XPS is a marginal improvement, at best. File sizes for documents may decrease 10%. You'll have to download and use entirely different software to make 'em and view 'em. In short, there's real reason to switch to the XPS format. Sure, it's cute, it's new, but there's really no reason.

Now compare this to the Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox foray: Microsoft had the upper hand in market-share and market penetrance. The Firefox browser was a heck of a lot more innovative, however, with its plugin architecture, skinnability, tabbed-browsing, and enhanced security. Unfortuantely, Internet Explorer has become synonymous with "open-portal for malicious hackers to override and zombify my computer, whilst filling it with spyware and other security threats" (OPFMHTOAZMCWFIWSAOST, as I like to call it). This helped get Firefox well on its way to obtaining a significant market-share very quickly. XPS just doesn't have the innovation and drive to push past PDF.