Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

As it had promised following a recent meeting with representatives of several printing-industry organizations, Adobe Systems yesterday announced its solution for dealing with a controversial relationship with FedEx Kinko’s. The industry contingent had complained to Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen and other executives that the inclusion of links within the company’s Acrobat and free Adobe Reader programs to send files directly to a local FedEx Kinko’s shop for printing gave the Adobe partner an unfair advantage over other printers, many long-time users of and advocates for Acrobat and PDF.

Adobe has decided to remove the FedEx Kinko’s links in upcoming releases of both programs, according to a blog posting yesterday by John Loiacono, SVP of the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe. The update will be released in about 10 weeks, Loiacono wrote. He thanked FedEx Kinko’s for helping to find a satisfactory outcome to the dilemma. “They could have taken a tough line,” he wrote, “because we do have a formal contract, but they showed a lot of class and understanding about the concerns within the print community.”

Not all industry watchers were in agreement that Adobe needed to satisfy the demands of printing organizations, several which had joined forces in telling Adobe their members felt betrayed by the inclusion of the FedEx Kinko’s feature that was added in the recent version 8.1 releases of Acrobat and Reader.

In an opinion piece published on CreativePro.com titled “Why the Adobe/FedEx-Kinkos Deal is the Best Thing that Could Happen to the Printing Industry,” Gene Gable advised Chizen to “politely tell the printing industry to ‘grow up’ and start thinking like a real business instead of a bunch of molly-coddled whiners set on blaming others for their self-created woes.”

Gable concludes:

“The outcry from the printing industry regarding the Adobe/FedEx deal has only demonstrated to me that not much has changed in the last two decades. Printers are still thinking too small and are too narrow minded to get out of the rut they have dug for themselves.”

According to published reports, industry representatives who met with Chizen and other top Adobe executives were both pleased and a little surprised by Adobe’s August 1 decision.

“I’m amazed. I really didn’t expect them to do it,” said Kenneth B. Chaletzky, president of Dulles, Va.-based Copy General Corp., according to a Dow Jones report about the proposed solution.

The article added:

“We’re pleased that Adobe was responsive,” said Joseph P. Truncale, president and chief executive of the National Association for Printing Leadership, which he says counts about 3,400 printers, designers and graphic-arts companies as members. “Clearly this was a mistake, and Adobe admitted that.”

Adobe has posted an official FedEx Kinko’s update [PDF: 58 kb] announcement, as well as an FAQ document [PDF: 44 kb] about the issues and its solution. According to Adobe, FedEx Kinkos will continue to distribute a version of Adobe Reader with the option from its website.

Anyone interested in removing the FedEx Kinko’s links prior to the next updates can follow the instructions in a recent Adobe Technote titled “Disable the Fedex-Kinko’s Print Service in Acrobat, Acrobat 3D 8 and Adobe Reader.”