First, I believe we all know the profit motive behind the deal made with FedEx and Adobe. As to profit- we can all agree it is a righteous goal.

However, take a look at your Firefox Browser. Notice the Search bar embedded in it. Did you know you can choose which search provider you want to conduct your search?

It really should be this way with Adobe.

In the race to make it even simpler to send print jobs to your local printer, just as we have added banks to our electronic checkbooks and payees to our electronic banking sites- we want to have access to any printer we want, in Adobe.

It really should be All-or-nothing!

So send the code out for the drop down menu adobe, and let all the members of the printing associations submit their entries. Now we can even then search for local printers via the Adobe software and select the ones we like nearest our offices or homes.

This is not rocket science.

Mark Watson

Aurora, IL

markrwatson07@gmail.com

“The company did not immediately respond to our requests for comment”

The oldest trick in the journalistic dirty tricks book ;-) – fire off a fax five minutes before publication. No response? – Then the company did not IMMEDIATELY respond... they did not, so nothing is wrong, and the reader assumes that the company is hiding something...

Not that I support Adobe in any way. This button deal is ridiculous. Stupid (read: average) users will think that the only way to print this document offsite is with FedEx.

An ideal solution would be a website that would list all the printing companies, with prices and types of services offered – e.g. wet prints, laser prints, booklet printing... the user would then choose from a list based on a postcode or whatever other criteria preferred.

They probably should have considered this before they chose to do this;

"Many of our member companies have, with the encouragement of Adobe, actively promoted the use of Adobe Acrobat products - and a PDF workflow - with their clients.

(They) have played such a pivotal role in establishing Adobe as the defacto standard among many end users for reading documents and printing file submission.

A lot of our members have been official Adobe business partners, they pay to be part of the Adobe solutions network. They use Adobe software. They've got the Adobe logo on their web sites. They've got it on their front doors."

Anyone who thinks this thing is simple should look into just what the

functionality is and start thinking through how they'd implement this same

service.

I neither work for Kinko's nor do I work for Adobe.

This is a hard problem that looks simple on the surface because they've made

it easy for the user.

If you don't believe me, start figuring it out on the process end, the business

end, don't stop at the basic client engineering.

Cheers,

Matthew

This type of buttons popping up in the program updates makes document security much harder.

Imagine an employee accidentally hitting the wrong printer button when printing out a confidential document. The IT department of the company may not even know this button is there so they can block the service.

Adobe may trust FedEx all they like, but for them to push this trust onwards to all customers is arrogant.

I've thought Mud Dancer was a crap product for years. Proprietary crap!

They should have been promoting DJVU.

Well it's not too late:

http://djvu.org/

If i'd have built it, it'd work like this:

1) Printers pay a listing subscription to adobe.

2) Customer wants to print so clicks button and enters zip code.

3) Adobe prtesents available (subscribed) printers in the vicinity

4) Customer chooses which print shop to send docs to.

5) Customer chooses to collect, or pay online and recieve in post.

6) Customer rates printshop.

Simple.

If I was IT manager, or in charge of security, at a company with sensitive IP, I would want to disable the feature entirely, lest someone manage to send a confidential document out to be printed. Probably also true of government departments. I haven't tried out the button on principle, but I suspect it uses a method that would get through most firewalls.

I totally disagree with you Matthew. If they have figured out the connections etc with Kinkos it would surely be a relatively small step to publish the interface and at the very least make it possible for users to 4replace fedex with "their favourite printer". Printers could be given a spec for the format of a file which they could send to their clients to morph the reader into "theirs".

Where there is a will there is a way - Adobe has enough software guys on staff to sort this out pronto.

How exactly does this square with the laws against anti-competitive business practices?

It's bad enough that Adobe have managed to persuade so many people that Acrobat Reader is the only thing that can display PDF documents, let alone that only one printing firm can print them. (I've taken to e-mailing webmasters who insist that Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view PDF files, and pointing out that this is not in fact the case: there are Open Source PDF readers and editors out there.)

Most of the world's population doesn't reside in the USA. Why should I have a button for something, when I don't even know what it is? A "Fed Ex Kinko". Sounds like some kind of fruit.

there are so many variables involved with printing that it would be next to impossible to create an 'open' interface for other printing companies to use, simply because they would all have to operate in the same way/use same stock/offer services they may not currently offer

although a stupid bit of itegration to put it into acrobat, i think the service it offers is sound, although a simple dedicated client app would be more suited IMHO, just drag and drop the file to the app and fill out the forms, which reinforces the idea of sending to print, e.g. being printed off site rather than being churned out by the toner eating behemoth sat in the office corner

What exactly is a Kinko and what belongs to it?

As I said, it's not so simple. Having worked on just such a product and service, I understand just how complicated this can be. Frankly, I don't know how far Adobe has taken this, but consider this 10k foot view of some of the factors to be considered...for EACH print provider (from which some of you will be able to infer further work that has to be put in):

1/ how do you show the user (reliably) what their print job will look like?

-- Note this has to correlate to the paper selections, the bindery selections,

etc. that the particular provider has available on a per-location basis.

There has to be a price associated with each printing variable and bindery operation. All of the operations or selections that can affect the final look of the print job have to be representable and price-able on the client machine. The information has to be updated in real-time from the particular storefront for the particular print provider...

you don't want to send your important, urgent print job to a local store, not knowing what it might look like and also find out they're out of the particular paper you want. And if you're not going to show the user what it looks like, then there's no point in offering this linkage.

2/ Data models to support all of the possible variables have to be worked out and

verified...for each print provider. The structures have to be there in the back-end.

3/ the ordering system has to be set up and reliable. The fulfillment and handling of refunds has to be reliable.

My experience is that Adobe does indeed provide some country-specific customisation of their products. (No, I don't own any of their products, nor do I work for them, nor do I like their PDF reader).

This tempest-in-a-teapot is likely confined to North America, and maybe US. I don't know if FedEx/Kinkos are in Canada.

I haven't used Kinko's in a long time. Probably 7 years now. They are usually higher priced and don't provide any services that I can't get elsewhere. And my preferred printer now has a secure ftp site (you need to have an sftp, they provide one on their site). So I don't even need to burn a CD. Besides which, they're a local company.

I do use FedEx for shipping, so it's not a boycott against FedEx. It's not really even a boycott. It's purely convenience and pricing (Kinko's is five or six miles away, my local printer is about two).

There is one in Reading, UK. I haven't seen any others in the UK, mind.

By Fraser

"I've wondered for a while...

What exactly is a Kinko and what belongs to it?"

Maybe this is it?

Kinko The Clown

By: Ogden Edsl

Kinko, Kinko the Kid Loving Clown

If the kids just love me back, I'll never wear a frown

Kinko, Kinko the Kid Loving Clown

If the kids just love me back, I'll never wear a frown

Kinko's in his Kinko car

pockets full of change

lots of dirty pictures

and sticky candy canes

All the kids love Kinko for the presents that they get

Silly leather clothes to wear and happy cigarettes

Hi, boys and girls, my name is Kinko the Clown

and I really love you boys and girls, really really

But my legs get tired standing out in the parking lot

handing out stale tootsie rolls to you little rugrats,

so if anyone want to come back to Kinko's trailer

and massage his legs, he'd really really like it

Really really

Kinko, Kinko the Kid Loving Clown

If the kids just love me back, I'll never wear a frown

Kinko, Kinko the Kid Loving Clown

If the kids just love me back, I'll never wear a frown

We go to Kinko's clubhouse sometimes after school

We play in Kinko's crawlspace

There's never any rules

We have to sit on Kinko's lap

There's never any chairs

Kinko likes to tickle us

and give us funny stares

Oh gosh, I haven't had this much fun since last Christmas

when I got to play Santa Claus and all the boys and girls

got to sit on Kinko's lap.

Little Boy: Mommy Mommy, Kinko hurt me!

But that was in Indianapolis, and thanks to the liberal

reciprocity laws, Kinko can be with you boys and girls

today or anytime.

Jimmy Johnson ran away and didn't say goodbye.

Kinko went to look for him to help the FBI

But Kinko had some handcuffs on

His eyes were full of tears

Said, "I'll be back to play with you sometime in 20 years."

Kinko, Kinko the Kid Loving Clown

The parents want to beat me up and run me out of town

Kinko, Kinko the Kid Loving Clown

Tar and feather Kinko and run him out of town

Officer: OK Shorteyes, get in the car

Good bye boys and girls

GOODBYE KINKO

See you at the turn of the century, cause Kinko

really loves you boys and girls, really really

I seem to remember the line "look kids there's a squirrel in Kinkos pocket" but it's not in this copy of the lyrics...

There used to be a Kinko in Leeds, but it closed down a while ago, never seemed to any good business...