Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.
Transcript
2003:
[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]
Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we’re building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.
2010:
Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they’re DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?
[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]
Bearded Fellow: It’s the world’s tiniest open-source violin.
Yes and No.
They were really designed to show the same output on the screen and printer.
Even if you are using the same word processor software and file format, a document can look vastly different when you send it to someone else who doesn’t have the same screen resolution or the same fonts installed.
PDF started as just a print preview for the postscript printer language. They should have just stopped there instead of trying to make it do all sorts of other shit that can open security holes.
The constant parade of file formats drove popularity, but it was really about being the only popular format to look the same.