Yahoo! and Adobe … Strange Bedfellows with Stranger Offspring
Yahoo, Adobe Team Up for New Web Services
I’m hoping that Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo Search Evangelist Extraordinaire, will see this post. Jeremy: Could you please explain this partnership in geek-speak, and let us know if anything useful will actually come of it? We’ll put aside the fact that the headline uses “Web Services” in a way that it’s typically not used. From the article, this toolbar seems like the Worst Idea Ever…. something dreamed up in marketingland, with no real function or usefulness. Ok…. it’ll link to Adobe’s paid PDF service. And it’ll link to Yahoo services. Presumably it will also offer Yahoo search (is there not already a Yahoo search toolbar?!). Hmm. Big innovation there.
Later, the companies said, the toolbar will add features such as the ability to quickly convert Web-based content into Adobe PDF files.
Two big problems with this:
1) Adobe can’t just give away PDF-generation software in a browser plugin. That’d kill their sales of Acrobat (full version). Obviously it’d be very stripped-down in terms of capabilities, but it’d definitely take away their sales to people who just want to create simple PDFs from Word documents or whatever. Word -> Export to HTML -> View in Browser -> Convert to PDF. Yes, it would lose some formatting, but most people don’t care much about margins or whatever else might change. They just want it in PDF format, for whatever reason.
2) Who the hell wants to make PDFs from general web content anyway? The web content is more portable. For easier printing? Humbug. If it’s complicated enough that the browser can’t print it out on its own, then good luck getting a decent PDF out of it.
So that feature is both 2) Useless for its presumably intended purpose and 1) Useful for avoiding the purchase of the full version of Acrobat. So it’s a no-go on two fronts.
Yahoo search will also be built into a future version of the Acrobat Reader, allowing users to search for more information from within the document without going through the extra steps of launching a Web browser.
“We call it being available at the point of inspiration,” said Tim Cadogan, Yahoo’s vice president of search.
Why would anybody want to search the Web from within Acrobat? Like it’s a big deal to open up a browser window? (As if 90%+ of all PDFs aren’t already viewed in the Acrobat Reader browser plugin anyway; and of course hyperlinks have been supported in PDFs for some time now, opening in the default browser when clicked.) Are the results actually going to be presented in Acrobat, i.e. is Acrobat going to become a browser? This whole thing just comes across as half-baked.
Now that I think about it, “Search Web for…” ought to be implemented in the OS/window manager, not individual programs like Acrobat. From Notepad, Word, Palm sync software, you name it — along with Copy/Paste/Cut should come “Search” with the default browser. THAT is what Microsoft should have done in XP, making IE and MSN the default search tools. A lot of people would be used to using MSN search just because of the convenience of it all. I think we’ve all grown tired of the Select->Copy->Go to Browser->Paste->Search routine, although I don’t think I’ve ever done it from Acrobat. Mostly I have to copy and paste from e-mails and text files viewed/edited in console windows. Presumably Apple will have some sort of OS-wide “Search Google” thingamabob built into Tiger.
Anyway, this Adobe/Yahoo! partnering really seems like a pretty dumb idea at the moment. If Yahoo doesn’t already have a browser toolbar, I guess it would be beneficial to Yahoo for it to be bundled with Acrobat Reader, but most everybody already has Acrobat Reader and probably won’t feel the need to upgrade anytime soon. I’d think that Yahoo, being the #1 site in the world and all, shouldn’t have much trouble getting people to adopt its toolbar anyway. I guess that the “sneak attack” of having it bundled with Acrobat Reader might get some people to use it who wouldn’t ordinarily (granted, this is 75% of the Net-using populace, but this 75% of the Net-using populace also doesn’t know how to use Bookmarks or change their Home Page, and types/pastes URLs straight into Google/Yahoo/MSN/insert-ISP-here’s Search box instead of the Location Bar of their browser, so their chances of noticing and/or using the Yahoo Toolbar are limited), but I’d hardly consider that a strong point. If you’ve gotta fly your product under the consumer’s radar, chances are your product isn’t so great to start with.