MS made changes to MS Office documents also because it caused a lot of users to publish documents that had change history and old version contents which the user didn't know about. Last I heard MS acknowledged the problem and was making changes so that users would not fall into that trap as easily. It has caused some quite embarrassing slipups.
I share Colin's sentiments against pdf. Not so much because it's bad at what it does, but because it's a bad format for ebooks and for a lot of web content. The software has some DRM that has gone from ugly to worse. (For example, I believe new versions allow "after the fact" restrictions and monitoring of your usage.) It's also a big pain to wait for pdf docs to load... why else would there be frequent "pdf warnings" on web pages. And it's hard to read on mobile devices with small screens. The mobile software is scarce, and those that do exist are only adequate. Even some great software like Repligo, which is slick and solid software and maybe even the best, but still due to pdf format it's not pleasant to read many pdf documents.
But for exact replication of complicated documents page by page (which is the very property that seems to make it hard to read on small screens), I have to admit it's actually pretty good. Maybe not the best technology, but pretty darn good for a standard.
So I guess I'm agreeing with both of you. To pick on pdf for the comment field is maybe a bit, well, picky. But a valid complaint. And I also see the frustration, especially in the mobile world, over the limitations of pdf documents and the DRM associated with it. That frustration is certainly going to spill over in a lot of ways when other limitations pop up. And I'd say rightly so, because we are squarely in the camp of mobile computing, and pdf does not appear to be a good mobile solution.
Not sure if that all makes any sense, but it felt good to express it nonetheless!
