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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."
Is that so? Good for him.
I printed his article, just so I had the satisfaction of throwing it out.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
I think the statement that 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use Word might be optimistic.
600 million to 1 billion people use Word, around 45 people worldwide actually have any clue how to use it. Around 11 people understand how to use it with the "ribbon interface".
Just another ignorant American.
Why did this end up on the front page of /.?
You must be new here.
Why did this end up on the front page of /.?
/. is automated in such a fashion that if you submit a story that contains the text "MS Word" and "die", it skips the moderators and is automatically posted under the "ScuttleMonkey" account.
i believe
Word is the emacs of word processor, whatever it has become now.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Emacs, you insensitive clod.
You mispelled Vi.
Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?
If so, would you care to support that assertion?
Sure! Word is an evil text processor. good != evil, therefore, Q.E.D.
Emacs is a good OS, but if there's one thing it needs, it's a good word processor.
Emacs, you insensitive clod.
You mispelled ed.
Fixed that for you.
Simple math:
MS: +10
Word: +5
die: +5
swift death: +5
I actually like Word 2007... is there some kind of support group I can join?
but the print count continues to climb, every single year.
How are things going over there at the US Mint?
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Not sure we should take your opinion on word processors seriously, given that you seperate paragraphs with full stops.
Augh, you missed a perfectly good chance to use the "correlation is not causation" meme!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Back when it first showed up on the Mac, I found that if you have a heading and a paragraph with different font characteristics, and you place the cursor before the first character in the paragraph, and then hit backspace and delete the newline between the heading and the paragraph, the whole paragraph suddenly gets the heading's text attributes.
Since that time, several Microsoft apologists have tried to tell me that it's supposed to work like that. Sorry, but if I can affect the typeface ahead of the cursor by hitting backspace, that's a monumental fuck up by the software vendor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This says it all: http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/3d.jpg
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