InfoWorld: Top News posts Microsoft to pull PDF, XPS support from Office 2007. “Microsoft Corp. has decided to delete from its next version of Office an automatic way to save documents in PDF (Portable Document Format) after Adobe Systems Inc. threatened to take legal action.”
How strange. There must be more to this. PDF output is included with Apple's OS X. OpenOffice.org has the option to save files as PDF on Linux, OS X, Windows and everywhere else it runs. PDF output is free for anyone willing to dig around for it, from the free Ghostscript to PDFCreator.
Either Microsoft was infringing on Adobe's extensions to the basic PDF, or something else was in play here. I'm looking forward to some followup article that might shed more light here.
Another day, another Microsoft announcement of a dropped feature. Boy, the company is building an impossibly difficult hurdle to shipping new products.