Microsoft has announced that Office 2007

Microsoft has announced that Office 2007 SP2 will ship within the next month or so.
For quite a while now those enterprising individuals who have taken the time to look on the Microsoft web site have been able to download and install support into Office 2007  for exporting documents as PDF and XPS, and for importing and exporting ODF files. On the other hand many users didn’t know that the downloads were available, or worked under a corporate policy that prevented them from installing them. SP2 moves this functionality to a push model so that anyone who uses Microsoft update will get it automatically.
I’m going to show my age now …
Time was when the strongest reason for buying a big and expensive application for viewing and (rather limited) editing of PDF files was because that was the only way you could get a reliable tool for making the files in the first place. Jaws PDF Creator was one of the few high-quality PDF creation solutions that could be purchased separately.
And now the office suite with (probably?) the largest user base worldwide will provide you with that ability for free, catching up with many other suites that have been able to do so for some time.
What does this mean for Global Graphics? Is it the end of an era? Should we shut up shop on PDF creation?
Well, no, of course not. While the difficulty of making PDF files has decreased over time the need to do more than just read and review the results has greatly increased. That’s why the emphasis is shifting from creation to maximising productivity in post-creation tasks in our up-coming releases. Hitting the right feature set and making it as easy as possible for people to achieve their needs are our focus.
And PDF creation? Well, the market has turned round, you don’t buy the editor to get the creator any more but you can get the creator bundled with the editor …
So this isn’t yet the end of an era. As Winston Churchill said (about far more serious matters than office productivity): “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”