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"Just imagine if someone emailed you a PDF or an Excel file and you didn't have the exact verion of the PDF reader or Excel that would open that file. Your head would blow clean off."

Obviously this person has never spent a good deal of time dealing with AutoCAD...

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Or more to the point early versions of the MS Office suite, where major updates could and did create backwards-incompatible saves. Users had to be careful that files intended for broader distribution were saved in a sufficiently old/compatible format version.

Which is to say: this is a sign that the involved technologies are still rapidly maturing.

or excel!

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