Great idea in general but there are two major flaws with your idea there Chris.

Firstly, you may recall the problems Microsoft had including a PDF writer into office and the legal problems it caused. Including a PDF reader with windows will, no doubt cause the lawers get their guns ready – despite allowing Apple/Linux distro’s to do it.

Thirdly, if Microsoft did licence it and that allows then to write their own PDF reader, that would be fantastic. However, if you are suggesting that Microsoft pre-ships Adobe Reader (the most bloated pointless product available that offers to read simple documents for just a mere 100mb+) then you must be living in another dimension. I would remove it instantly and use a light weight prodct like Foxit Reader.

However, not only that, but if MS ship Adobe reader with Windows would you not invoke the wrath of the ‘I don’t what what Microsoft give me, I want a choice damn it’.

It’s a damn PDF reader Chris. Download it and install it. Didn’t you have to install Office? Did you have to install Flash Player? What about Apple iTunes? Or should they ship that with Windows too?

Maybe you havn’t actually found a problem with Windows 7 yet, because writing an article based on this is, well, quite frankly sad to every extreme.

20 minutes? Really?

I use PDF creator it’s free and works well. some of the other products produce inordinately massive files. the PDF app that came with my HP scanner is guilty of this. your observation brings that age old question what should MS include with their OS or should it be an OS that you have to install all your own software on. Some Linux Distro’s give you this leve of choice and have to be shipped on 3 DVD’s and take for ever to install once you have decided which one you would like to install.

Nothing compares to being able to press the spacebar to see a readable version of the document/image/video.

Win7 certainly can’t do that. Not including even a basic PDF reader is, these days, absurd.

It’s not proprietary (although MS would like it to be) so there’re few legal issues – if you ignore Microsoft’s desperate need to use XPS while the rest of the world uses pdf.

There are many programs that do Print to pdf. A good example being PDFCreator.

oh and Mac/windows are so similar now hardwar/software there really is no point splitting hairs about things like this. *One system has something another doesn’t, well there is usually a great open source program to do the exact same thing for the other sytem(if not both*)

Apple built their OS on PDF as it can easily handle bitmap and vectors. So an upshot is that OS X can view/edit PDFs. Windows is not.

Another more basic reason is this; as the monopoly OS provider Microsoft just can’t include every editor for every format you want. They got in a enough problems for including a basic browser to download applications.

This is the Windows life though. You chose the application you want to use for the job. You don’t just take what you are give and stay happy with it.

It’s the whole reason I couldn’t live with OS X. If you don’t like the one or two solutions, thats it you are out of choices.

Did you have anything more useful to write about?

A Mac user trying to use Windows 7 and couldnt find a pdf reader. Well like the others it shouldnt have it included as then that would be another security nightmare to maintain.

Adobe arent going to like MS including a viewer just as much as Apple dont want flash on the iPhone.

Oh god my iPhone doesnt support flash, who cares.

Oh god my iBigMac doesnt come with decent office software.

You can always write for Macuser or some other macwacky publication. This is PC Pro sunshine.

Sorry Mac you charge too much, double charge people when they lose music on their iPhone because you force us to use idiotTunes…shall i go on?

and before the fan boys start oiling themselves I have a iPhone, only because there isnt a better phone out there, but I want be switch my PC or the other 700 I manage to a whitebox

@R – think your being a bit hard on the writer. Just look on the bright side – if this is the only thing thats been a downer between MAC OSX and Win7 any more then its a win for M$!

I have a coupld of old mac’s running OSX 10.4.11 and pretty happy with them.

But I quite often think – “Sorry Apple, where is a decent file manager and where’s and cut option in Finder” Finder is the biggest waste of space ever – especially on smaller screens.

I’d like to see Chris’s view on file management in Windows V MAC OSX.

EDIT!

@R – think your being a bit hard on the writer. Just look on the bright side – if this is the only thing thats been a downer between MAC OSX and Win7 then its a win for M$!

I have a couple of old mac’s running OSX 10.4.11 and pretty happy with them. Even though I’m a Win man at work (XP) and main PC at home is (Win7/Vista).

But I also quite often think – “Sorry Apple, where is a decent file manager and where’s and cut option in Finder” Finder is the biggest waste of space ever – especially on smaller screens.

I’d like to see Chris’s view on file management in Windows V MAC OSX.

Windows does lack built-in support for a lot of formats, but I think the licensing/anti-competitive behaviour issues do give them an excuse.
However in this case Adobe made PDF an open standard last year (http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1141), so surely there’s no excuse for them not to have a basic PDF viewer now?

Open Office 3.1 will open and save PDF files in Writer, (the OO equivalent of M$ word)

Dont you just hate people who write M$ when they mean Microsoft?

Does Windows 7 even include native viewers for doc, xls, docx, xlsx files? Earlier versions of Windows didn’t and there’s no anticompetitive argument there.

Don’t see the problem with downloading the free Adobe PDF viewer the first time you need it, although I wish Adobe would get rid of the constant nagware about updates etc. As for printing to PDF, I don’t see why MS Office can’t do this by default, even if it’s a licencing issue. After all, product costs enough anyway, and the free OpenOffice suite has been able to do this for years. I suspect it’s partly M$ sulking because people want to use a non-M$ format.

Oh, and a lot of the whinging about the EU and Microsoft is misplaced: if M$ were capable of building properly tested, componentised software, then it would have been easy enough to allow for optional components like the browser etc which prompted so much trouble in the first place. The fact that M$ claimed they had to rip apart their operating software to permit such a simple modification tells you more about M$ and their monolithic bloatware than it does about the EU.

I know it’s been said, but I had to again… the EU surely would have put and end to it if they included their own!

@chrisw Print to pdf is not included in Office for the same reason it isn’t included in the OS. Namely that as Microsoft is deemed to have a monopoly with Windows they aren’t allowed to bundle functionality into the OS that is deemed anti-competitive.

Basically they can’t include their own pdf generation tools because that wouldn’t be fair to Adobe. Apple aren’t affected by their market share isn’t large enough for competition law to be an issue.

I am sure Microsoft would love to be able to include pdf generation as part of the OS but they can’t.