Adobe Hosts Forum to Discuss FedEx Kinko’s Deal

“Our Position Hasn’t Wavered,” says NAPL.

By Cary Sherburne

July 23, 2007 -- On Tuesday, July 17th, Adobe hosted a “Print Advisory Forum” in San Francisco to “address concerns raised within the printing industry” over its deal with FedEx Kinko’s that places a “send to FedEx Kinko’s” button in every copy of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader 8.1.  As reported by WhatTheyThink and as has been discussed in great detail in the PrintCEOblog and in the PrintPlanet discussion groups, this move by Adobe has created a firestorm in the print community, and Adobe’s forum was an effort on their part to explain their position and to hear feedback firsthand.  The Forum was attended by nine people in person, with another ten or so participating via Acrobat Live.  Adobe barred the press from attending this session.  Attendees included executives from all of the major print franchise organizations and printing associations and a few vendor partners, as well as a representative from Office Depot.

Steve Johnson, NAQP president and CEO which is part of the NAPL network, presented a position paper to Adobe on behalf of The Graphic Communications Coalition for Open Competition, a coalition that was formed to protest the agreement and to work toward having the involved parties promptly dissolve the agreement. The coalition includes NAPL, NAQP, and franchise organizations AlphaGraphics, Allegra, Minuteman Press, Sir Speedy, ICED, PIP and Signal Graphics.  Steve Bonoff, Executive Director of IPA, was also present at the meeting.

In its position paper, the Coalition stated that it “views the agreement as providing an unfair advantage to FedEx/Kinko’s at the expense of the many printing and graphic communications companies that have worked in good faith in cooperation with—and with the active encouragement of—Adobe Systems, Inc., to make Adobe software the de facto standard among many end users for reading documents and printing-file submission.” It urged Adobe to extricate itself from the agreement with FedEx Kinko’s and to remove the FedEx Kinko’s logo and embedded link from its software in a timely manner, indicating, “anything short of that is unacceptable to this coalition.”

The Coalition reinforced its firm commitment to getting the button removed by saying, “…should Adobe Systems not comply with this request, the Coalition will continue to work actively on this issue, exploring any and all options—both legal and otherwise—to have the agreement blocked and to encourage our members to explore alternative applications to Adobe.”

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen attended the Forum and once again apologized for creating this firestorm, indicated Adobe was there to listen to concerns, but he also pointed out Adobe had a contractual relationship with FedEx Kinko’s that the company needed to fulfill.  One attendee commented that Adobe also has a contractual relationship with the printing community.  Although it is not in writing, it is an implied contract with its customers to be fair given Adobe’s position in the industry. It was also stated that Mr. Chizen had to leave the meeting after an hour, and one wag in the audience asked, “What is more important than 20,000 printers?”  Although Mr. Chizen did leave the meeting early, to his credit, he did stay longer than an hour.

Attendees pointed out that a better way for Adobe to have approached this issue would have been to leverage its Adobe Solutions Network (ASN) Print Service Provider Program, a community that is already established, and one which print service providers pay a fee to participate in.  Attendees felt that the FedEx Kinko’s deal undermines the relationships they have built through that program.

Also present at the Forum was a representative from the Association of College and University Printers (ACUP), who joined his in-plant colleagues in strongly objecting to this deal as well, pointing out that of course, they would prefer print volume to be directed to their in-plant shop rather than FedEx Kinko’s, but more importantly, they had security and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) concerns. 

Especially in the college and university environment, organizations are concerned about inappropriate copying and distribution of copyrighted materials.  In addition, for many types of business materials, including financial documents, handling of those documents requires an audit trail, and potentially, the Acrobat “Print to FedEx Kinko’s” button may be a way to circumvent that audit trail. If that is, indeed, the correct interpretation of the SOX issue ACUP raised, that could prove to be an even bigger issue for the ultimate success of the deal.  Legal action might then involve both the FTC and the SEC.

Following the Forum, Adobe issued a statement that offered comments on the outcome of the forum, which several attendees described as a sanitized version that did not accurately reflect the position of attendees.  Adobe indicated at the conclusion of the forum that the company would communicate a disposition of this issue on August 1, but gave no indication of what that disposition might be.

Neither Adobe nor FedEx Kinko’s have revealed any details of the financial arrangements inherent in this agreement, although it is widely assumed that Adobe would benefit financially in direct relation to the volume of printing that was submitted via this mechanism. It is also widely assumed that this potential financial benefit is not the issue as much as the legal and financial ramifications should Adobe breach or terminate the agreement.

In the meantime, Adobe has made available a link with instructions to remove the button, but as one poster to the PrintPlanet Forums pointed out, it requires making changes to the registry on individual computers, adding, “Can someone at a printing company realistically ask a client to edit the registry of all their Windows based computers and make this change? I'd get laughed at if I tried to do something like that.”

In another interesting development, following the meeting EFI announced a new version of its PrintMessenger PDF-generating drivers that let print service providers choose to remove the FedEx Kinko’s button and any other shortcuts which route print jobs to other print service providers from the user interface of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat applications. PrintMessenger is a standard feature of EFI's Web-To-Print platform, Digital StoreFront™. The new PrintMessenger creates a "File-Print" link for printers for their own shop from within Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat as well as any other Apple Macintosh® or Windows® application, and removes the FedEx Kinko’s button.  EFI indicates that this capability will be available in Digital StoreFront and PrinterSite Exchange, the hosted version of Digital StoreFront, within the next 30 days.  EFI will make the capability available in its PrintSmith Site Web-to-Print solution (widely used in the franchise print community) in the 4th quarter of 2007. 

With this feature, when an end user customer accesses the online storefront to submit a print job using client software, the print service provider can configure the software to either automatically remove the FedEx Kinko’s button or other shortcuts, or to notify the end user that the registry is going to be modified to delete the shortcuts, giving them the opportunity to accept or decline this change.  Alternatively, for in-house implementations, corporate IT departments can push this modification to all corporate workstations.  With the Digital StoreFront auto update feature, anytime Acrobat Reader or Adobe Acrobat is updated or reinstalled, the registry entry will be deleted again, ensuring its permanent disablement.

EFI is the first to market with this workaround, but certainly will not be the last.

WhatTheyThink contacted Marc Olin, senior vice president/general manager, EFI Professional Printing Applications, who also attended the Adobe Forum.  Olin said, “Adobe has been nothing but helpful in this process, and they have published the methodology by which to do what we did with Digital StoreFront.  There appears to be nothing in their contract with FedEx Kinko’s that prevents them from providing the ability for others to remove the button, but from what they are saying publicly, they seem to be obligated to leave the button there.”

Olin added, “Clearly, Adobe is feeling very conflicted here.  While I certainly do not presume to speak for them, you can see it from their public statements.  They have provided the technical capabilities to work around this button, and the advantage that EFI has in being able to leverage this workaround so quickly is a client-based installer for Digital StoreFront that gives us the ability to do the registry modifications to remove the button.  Also, because we have a live update feature as part of the installer, we are able to consistently monitor the registry and remove any additional upgrades that are added.”

As Olin points out, though, this is a drop in the bucket.  He says, “There are some 60 million copies of Reader out there.  The reach with Digital StoreFront will be in the tens of thousands.”

For Adobe, this move has become a PR nightmare.  FedEx Kinko’s has been relatively silent on the issue, other than issuing a brief statement that the relationship between Adobe and FedEx Kinko's was established with FedEx Kinko’s customers in mind. But FedEx Kinko’s has certainly gotten a lot of PR mileage out of the issue.  So far, this brouhaha does not seem to have been picked up in the mainstream press, although there has been some discussion on the financial message boards.

Many printers and bloggers are recommending discontinuing the use of Adobe products, but how realistic is that, really?  Perhaps printers can begin using more alternative Open Source solutions, as our Dr. Joe Webb has been recommending for some time, but they quite often don’t have control over what composition or document sharing solutions their customer base uses, and they must support the choices their customers make.

By the way, most of our discussion has focused on print service provider reaction, but a recent PrintBuyersOnline survey of print buyers reflected that 81% of respondents believe Adobe’s move is inappropriate, causing an unfair competitive advantage for FedEx Kinko’s.  So the disappointment with Adobe could be even more far reaching than they have experienced to date.

The big question, of course, is how could this have happened in the first place. Clearly, there must have been legal review of the contract. And its implementation requires modification to two key pieces of Adobe software. Perhaps it was an honest mistake, or perhaps Adobe simply thought it could slip through relatively unnoticed and/or not create such a strong market reaction. Either way, what's done is done, and now we need to wait till August 1st to see whether it will be undone.

Meanwhile, stay tuned to WhatTheyThink and PrintCEOblog for more developments in this continuing saga.