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Comment by blasdel | Hacker News Reader

They make an insane amount of money from the way that enterprises spend hundreds of dollars on Acrobat Professional licenses for every single computer. Sometimes they wise up and implement a baroque license management server where they only have to pay for a fraction of the licenses, but it still costs an insane amount of money.

When it gets used, it's almost exclusively for "Print to PDF". Power Users will use it to combine PDFs, and maybe do some shitty doodling. Occasionally the awful PDF forms functionality gets used, but they usually learn their lesson (easy to make one worse than an MS Access app!)

It's the calf to Microsoft's Office cash cow.

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PrimoPDF is another good alternative for enterprise users who just need print to PDF.

PDFCreator? Ghostscript? What's wrong with corporations? (I guess that's why startups can be so successful)

Based on some similar experiences with a corporate client:

- Purchasing-level decisions have to be approved by someone who worries less about the money being spent now than the situation the company will be in later. In other words, if I offer a free alternative to expensive commercial software, they'll be concerned that even though they'll save a few hundred or thousand dollars now, they'll be hamstrung if I ever leave, or if the free software vanishes.

- These decisions are also often made by individuals who are not all that technically inclined, so they're suspicious of what they see as "amateur" versus "professional" (or commercial, or enterprise) software.

- They're concerned about compatibility with their business partners.

- They find many of the things that we like about the representation of free or open source software -- names like "Mozilla", "Firefox", "Thunderbird", "Foxit Reader", the FreeBSD daemon -- to be amateurish and annoying.

Yes, that leaves the door wide open for startups. However, there's a reason why this tends to be the pattern as businesses go from "startup" to "enterprise".

Not to mention that your startup can't spare the people for a (completely unnecessary in most cases) 6-month pitch/RFP/proof-of-concept process.

Basically the incentives of the typical purchasing department are not well-aligned with the interests of the corporation as a whole.

> Basically the incentives of the typical purchasing department are not well-aligned with the interests of the corporation as a whole.

I don't know about "typical" purchasing departments (or personnel), but in the example I was giving, they actually are working in the interests of the corporation.

My point was that the interests of the corporation -- in this example -- are different from the interests of those who devote more of their time to their computers.

Here's one more anecdote: this same client recently replaced my inexpensive, well-tuned, up-to-date, carefully-configured OpenBSD firewall for their network with an off-the-shelf SonicWall device. That annoyed me, to say the least, and I'm of the opinion that the move has made their network less secure overall. On the other hand, I also realize that now they have a device with a simple, easy-to-understand interface, so when they choose to replace me with a full-time employee, they won't have to worry about whether the employee has any OpenBSD experience. It also guarantees that I'm not hiding any funky backdoors in their firewall, and hey, if there is a network incursion, then they can go after the SonicWall company ... versus not having anyone to catch the fault in the case that the OpenBSD box gets rooted.

I don't want to come across as mean here, but honestly, if someone can't understand why corporations aren't using more open source software, then they don't have much experience with corporations.

I've been using GNU/Linux for so long, I didn't realize until recently that Windows doesn't come with a virtual PDF printer. After a little searching I told some Windows using friends to install doPDF and they seem happy with it.

Wow. I’m not saying anything here, but it's interesting Print to PDF is such a big draw, when OS X's print dialog has included an option to save to PDF (or preview as PDF, or email as PDF, or import to X where X is Evernote, Yojimbo, etc.) for years

Microsoft has had print to Postscript since at least NT4, and would love to include print to PDF. However they know Adobe would kick up a massive legal fuss if they tried (like they did when MS tried to include save as PDF in office 2007). That being said you can easily download save as pdf for Office 2007 from Microsoft's homepage, and there are lots of very nice free print to pdf option available.

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