"Adobe killer" is a bum rap for Microsoft Metro

Memorial Day weekend included golf, barbecue, several unsuccessful attempts at doing a wheelie in an Italian sport tourer, consolation beer, total avoidance of the gym, more golf, and calling my buddy stationed overseas. (He's in Italy, near Venice. Seeing as how he's surrounded by guns, beer, and Italian women, I'm not overly concerned about him just yet.) Then I find out that Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are offering a national ID tracking system.

Free IT resource Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) May 22-23, 2007 Sponsored by OSBC Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft

This isn't the place to get political, though I do hope these folks have done some reading of time-tested authors such as Orwell, Heinlein, Gibson, and Stephenson. Then again, they're building it in .Net, so with any luck I should be able to hack in and make any necessary alterations. Whoops, now I'm on a blacklist.

Although one set of Microsoft developers is working hard to ensure our eldest male sibling always knows where we are, another set has been working hard to ease the burden on the shoulders of IT managers. Sort of. Either that or they're simply trying to increase the tendrils of Redmond dominance by integrating yet another software technology concept into one of their OSes. I'm talking about Metro, Microsoft's code name for its newly re-announced and somewhat more detailed secure document management standard.

Of course, the recent announcement and details of Metro have a number of folks crying, "Acrobat killer." And on the surface it looks that way. But look a little deeper and you'll find that Metro isn't positioned to kill Acrobat. Acrobat works the same across multiple platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever. An Acrobat document is an Acrobat document. Metro keeps getting mentioned in the same sentence as Longhorn. So far, no details have surfaced about the format's ability to hop OS boundaries. Instead, it's looking more as though Metro is simply another slick technology Microsoft will integrate deeply with its OS and most likely with Office, SharePoint, RMS (Rights Management Server), and similar platforms. There's no need to download and integrate Adobe any longer -- as long as you're running Windows.

Will that ease the heavy IT burden? Sure, if you're running a mostly Windows-based network. There's now no need to buy Acrobat creation tools or add PDF conversion plug-ins to several hundred copies of Word. Those tasks sound simple enough, but they consume real man-hours and real money. Some people worry that printer manufacturers won't pick up the Metro format with as much verve as they've shown for PDF, but who are these people kidding? Printer manufacturers probably have no choice, as Microsoft will include it as part of its Longhorn driver SDK. What will hurt Metro is what hurts all Microsoft-only technologies, the same bear trap the Redmond grizzly can't learn to avoid: Very few folks run a Microsoft-only network, and that number shrinks every day.

The impudent penguin is making deeper desktop inroads all the time, and the shiny apple still holds sway in document-centric verticals such as publishing and graphic design. Being able to create a customized document management and workflow system designed by users for users with SharePoint, Word, Publisher, and RMS makes for an impressive demo and certainly would make that IT manager's life easier. But having the system drop like a stone as soon as you need to export your work to something running OS X is a real-life consideration that's going to relegate Metro to the back burner for most folks -- unless Microsoft smartens up. There's plenty of time before Longhorn officially rolls out, so we'll just have to wait and see.

I think Microsoft might just smarten up, because as it stands I'm confused why the company is bothering with Metro at all. If it's only going to run in a Windows-centric environment, why not stick with an Office document format? RMS is more than enough to manage document control on this platform, and Microsoft already owns all that technology. Not to mention that several vendors already have format-conversion technology allowing Office documents limited travel capability into other systems. So what's Metro bringing to the table that Office hasn't already?

I guess we'll have to wait and see about that, too.