Adobe and...FedEx/Kinkos?

Watch out for the Kinkos button! J

From the WSJ:

Adobe Systems Inc., the maker of Acrobat and Flash software, faces a wave of criticism from printing companies protesting a deal that gives FedEx Kinko's stores a prominent link on Adobe software.

The brouhaha could hurt Adobe's standing with important customers and partners and also throw a wrench into FedEx Corp.'s plans to revitalize Kinko's, the copy-and-print chain it bought in 2004.

At issue is a new button on some Adobe software, released in June, that lets people electronically transfer documents directly to a FedEx Kinko's store to be printed. The button appears on new versions of Adobe's popular Acrobat and Reader software, which display documents in Adobe's PDF format. There are no buttons for competing printers on the products.

The button on the software "is kind of hard to miss when you launch it -- it's right there," says Kim Turk, a manager with Imagers, a family-run printing business in Atlanta. Ms. Turk, who wrote a letter to Adobe last month protesting the move, said her company and others could lose business because of the direct FedEx Kinko's link.