Brian Jones and Andy Simonds have posted about the legal issues with PDF support and what changes are in store for Windows and Office because of such issues.

Brian Jones:

About 8 months ago we announced to our MVPs that we would provide PDF publish support natively in the 2007 Office system. We made the move due to overwhelming customer demand for PDF support, and it was received really well. The blog post I made around the announcement was probably one of my most widely read posts of the year.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to be able to do the right thing for the customer now. There was a news article in the WSJ today (and now on CNet) indicating that Adobe didn't like that we provided the save to pdf functionality directly in the box, and so they’ve been pushing us to take it out. I'm still trying to figure that one out given that PDF is usually viewed as an open standard and there are other office suites out there that already support PDF output. I don't see us providing functionality that's any different from what others are doing.

Andy Simonds:

Let me cover the Windows side of the story. For several years we have been sharing detailed plans on XPS with Adobe. I’d say almost to an excess, we kept them up to speed on our designs and implementation at every step and we’ve made a lot of design modifications based on their input. They attend our conferences and plug-fests (plug fest: a multi-day meeting at Microsoft where partners learn about new technologies and share implementations) and we value them as an important Microsoft partner. We see XPS as a platform and still believe that the advances we are making with XPS will have a lot of benefits to Adobe products as well as all the other millions of customers and partners that use the Windows platform

Unfortunately, Adobe has been pushing for us to remove XPS from Windows. Given the clear benefits of XPS to customers and partners, this is something we can not do. We are always sensitive to competitor complaints when we design Windows and we’ve tried to address any concerns Adobe may have. But, we have to first and foremost design our products for customers, not competitors. XPS support in many ways is a natural evolution to the Windows platform. Windows has always had a way to publish documents (in the form of printing) and it is natural to move the platform forward improving the quality of the output of documents, making them more programmable and enabling a seamless transition between view and print scenarios. This is what our customers have been asking from the Windows platform and this is what we are delivering with XPS. We are very excited to deliver innovations in Windows Vista that address long-standing customer needs.