A couple things in his reportage grabbed my interest. First off, real-time commenting and collaboration is pretty sexy.

This has been theoretically possible for some time, with Acrobat Connect. But that method is clunky at best and doesn't really make traditional PDF comments or annotation.

Going back further, Adobe's nifty Comments Server, which has been around for several Acrobat revs, allows similar functions. But it requires a little technical knowhow and a pal in IT who help can set up space on the network.

Who knows what Acrobat 9 will actually ship with, but there's potential there; we'd hope it involves cracking open a document so that four or five people could simultaneously type annotations and comments directly into a PDF live on the Web, server be darned.

Then, in a perfect world, any of those collaborators would be able to open the document in Microsoft Word and incorporate comments as annotations or "track changes."

If version 9 falls short, there's always Rosebud, an elegant solution for real-time document review in Acrobat. The mastermind of that plug-in promises to have a new version to demo to me soon. Stay tuned.

Speaking of Acrobat Connect, it will be interesting to see how the next rev works. The clunky (I said it twice, that's right) Web-conferencing tool isn't really an Acrobat tool at all. Acrobat's more of a commercial for Connect's services, actually. But Connect could emerge as something a lot cooler, considering all the Flash-Flex and other media development going on around Adobe.

I've checked out the next-generation Connect, code-named Brio on Adobe Labs. It's very beta, and I think VoIP as a whole is holding the product back, too, so I'll reserve judgment for now.

Speaking of Adobe Labs stuff, does Share contain a preview of features that will be in Acrobat, or is it evidence that Adobe's sticking its toe in the Google Docs pool? There's something going on there.

Adobe remains officially mum on the sum total of the Acrobat 9 leaks, but one thing you can bet on: Acrobat Standard on the Mac, discontinued in 2006 when Acrobat 8 came out, isn't coming back in Acrobat 9. To me, that signals that Adobe feels Apple isn't capable of delivering enough enterprise users to Adobe to support it.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill.

In an email discussion, two gentlemen who are much smarter than me and are known for giving excellent presentations at PDF conferences, suggested that Macs printing to PDF from the operating system is all the PDF functionality the basic office user needs.

But Standard includes document commenting, Microsoft Office compatibilities, optical-character recognition, and a ton of other features the Mac OS doesn't.

Web capture? That's a great suite of features. Standard's best feature is its price, running just a little more than half of Acrobat Pro, depending on where you're buying. You can make primitive comments in Leopard, but it's not something that's trackable in Word the way Acrobat comments are.

There seem to be opportunities for both Macintosh and Linux to grab a couple fistfuls of the lucrative office desktop market share, what with Gartner analysts claiming that Windows is on the "verge of collapse." Those opportunities seem to be riper now than they've been in more than a decade, dating back to the pre-Internet boom 1990s when IBM was hacking away at Microsoft's market with OS/2, Apple was making a go at Windows in the enterprise, and Comdex was a psychotic madhouse of a trade show that had Vegas bursting at the seams.

Acrobat Standard could be a centerpiece of that cause. But that, of course, would mean that Apple and Adobe would have to get along a little better and co-develop a smart strategy.

At PDF conferences and seminars, I've heard the word "coop-etition" bandied about to describe Adobe's complicated partner-competitor relationship with Apple, whom on one hand it loves: As partners they've built the preferred platform upon which designers design and creatives create with InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

On the other hand, Apple's competing with Adobe on the video-creation side, and perhaps it's eroding Adobe's photo-editing market share as well. You read things like Steve Jobs ripping Adobe over Flash in front of a captive Apple shareholder audience. With partners like that, who needs Microsoft? That can't make for happy times at the Silicon Valley Elks Club beer-n-bingo night.

Speaking of Microsoft, as far as that relationship goes, there's no love lost between it and Adobe, either.

So in the end, we Mac users continue to be marginalized in the office setting. Lest you wonder what the decisionmakers up at the top of your company think of us and our Macs, look no further than this parody of the Mac-Windows TV ads.

Or this one.