A great feature of Mac OS X is that whatever you can print, you can save as a PDF document. I do this often for web pages (particular receipts of online purchases). It's also a great way to take a document in a mac specific or proprietary format and convert it to an open one. Well kinda, only parts of PDF are being standardized by ISO. But PDF is appearing in more and more places. OpenOffice has the same capability as OS X, it can save any of it's documents as PDFs. Windows Vista was going to add this capabililty as well, after all, gotta keep up with the competition. However it seems Adobe balked and told Microsoft they couldn't include the capability in Vista for free, they had to charge customers extra for it.
There's no reason given but it just seems like greed. While Adobe gives away a PDF viewer for free, they charge for full Acrobat which can create PDFs. They probably let Mac and OpenOffice get away with having this capability because their market share is so small, but they'd lose money on Acrobat sales if Windows had the capability. That's my guess at least. If so, for shame Adobe, gotta be fair.
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