As a competitor to the open PDF standard, Microsoft is once again accused of creating proprietary standards to monopolize markets and exclude competitors via its Windows monopoly.

Critics argue that XPS is designed to give Microsoft and copyright holders unlimited control over consumers' rights. Also many critics doubt the value of creating a competing, non-conforming standard where an open, ISO standard already exists.

Defenders of Microsoft note that XPS offers significant value to both developers of third-party applications and end-users: First, since the core technologies behind XPS replace the aging formats used by the spool printing service on Windows machines, the task of providing reliable and precise printing functionality from within Windows applications is dramatically simplified — programmers no longer have to work around the limitations of the old spool service.

Second, defenders argue that by offering XPS and its associated viewer applications, as well as exporters, users gain light-weight and free alternatives to the most used free PDF-viewer, Adobe Reader, and the commercial Adobe Acrobat PDF creation software, both of which many have argued have become excessively bloated.

Adobe Reader also includes advertisements for other Adobe products in recent versions (Adobe euphemistically calls the ads "Messages" — they are tied to an automatic updating feature that is turned on by default but can be turned off from the "Startup" preferences category).

In the eye of Microsoft supporters, Adobe Reader also has a less-than-stellar user interface due to issues like the feature bloat and inconvenient navigation/zooming. Thus, defenders of Microsoft would acknowledge that while Microsoft has historically been accused of pursuing an "embrace and extend" strategy, they would similarly accuse Adobe of pursuing an "extend and extend..." strategy that fails to add value to PDF