I'll jump in and say that I'm not in favor of the change. I can understand, and even somewhat agree with, the opinion that a co-worker should have his/her own status and be upgraded accordingly.
However, I have a unique problem. I have two residences, my family is on the west coast, and I work on the east coast. My reservations are always made like this, PHL-FAT-PHL, while my family (when we rarely travel together) would look like this, FAT-PHL-FAT. And yes, I realize that there are no direct flights for these two airports, this is the shorthand version without the extra connection through LAS or PHX.
So under the new policy, my spouse would never be eligible for upgrade on the 1 or 2 opportunities throughout the year that it would even apply. I qualified Platinum the hard way, by flying all of the miles and I did so mainly because I loved the liberal upgrade policy. This blows in my opinion.