20 Years of MS Word and Why It Should Die a Swift Death

Ars writer Jeremy Reimer takes a stroll down memory lane, recalling over 20 years of (almost) constant Microsoft Word use and why, with current and emerging tech trends, he thinks his relationship with the program may be at an end. "So why don't I need Word any more? To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do. In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. As a student I needed to print out essays so I could hand them to my instructor. In the office I needed to print out reports so that I could hand them to my supervisor. The end goal was always the same: I printed out something to give to someone more important than me, who would evaluate it and, if I was lucky, give it back to me at some indeterminate time in the future. One didn't question this; it was just the way the world worked. Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much. Maybe it was the rise of office networking. Maybe it was when the printer companies kept raising the price of ink to ridiculous levels. Maybe it was when we realized we couldn't print out the whole Internet. Despite the fact that fewer things were being printed, we kept on using Word to create our documents."

Comments

Re:Stupid conclusions

[timster]

Well, in the case of Microsoft Word, the analogy is more like "because I live within walking distance to work, I don't need a steam-powered locomotive with a cracked boiler. At all. Ever."

Look, I'm usually a calm and rational sort of guy, but I hate that effin' program.

Easily dismissed

[east coast]

Somewhere along the way, we stopped printing things out quite so much

So all those Staples ads about toner and ink are meant for that small niche of people who still own a printer? Please.

This is nothing more than a misled anti-Microsoft troll. How did this ever make it to the front page?

Re:PDFs?

[shiftless]

Someone mod this idiot flamebait