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

PDFs?

[Overunderrated]

With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.

Re:PDFs?

[xaxa]

Pages might be what you're used to and like, but that's becoming less and less the case.

I use Word about once a week, generally to fill in some template that a manager has produced for some official process. These are then printed out, and probably recycled within a week.

I've noticed my colleagues seem to spend as long trying to fix the formatting on these templates as they do filling in the empty boxes. Some simple HTML would be perfect here: they're only internal documents, millimetre-precision and perfect pagination isn't necessary (and Word doesn't give it anyway).

Some system is still needed for producing external stuff (whatever the people with Macs use in the media/marketing/publishing department, and something like Word for letters). Some scientists are probably using some collaborative functions of Word, but I doubt they care about the formatting until the very end of the work.

Re:PDFs?

[evilkasper]

Here's why we use Word; it comes bundled with Outlook. The people that pay us like Outlook; its simpler to have them use the whole Office suite than just part of it. It's not going anywhere.

Re:PDFs?

[techno-vampire]

Incidentally, I might add that both MS Word and OpenOffice Writer are still poor shadows of what WordPerfect used to be in terms of its power, even for serious publishing.

How true. Back in the days of WP 5.1, it was the standard word processing program for the legal industry. And, I might add, you never had to fumble with a document trying to figure out what formatting was being applied where. All you needed was to go into Reveal Codes mode, and you could look at the lower half of the screen and see for yourself exactly where the codes were.

Re:PDFs?

[jridley]

Yes, but it's kind of silly to distribute fixed documents in an editable format. If I am distributing something that I want to be left alone as is, I distribute it as a PDF. I only distribute DOC if I expect others to modify it.

Also, I have pretty good confidence that a PDF document will render pretty much the same in 10 years as it does today. I do NOT have that level of confidence in an MS Word document; history has shown that a document from an old version of Word, imported into a newer one, might render very differently than the author intended.

Re:PDFs?

[InlawBiker]

It's popular to hate Microsoft but in all honesty MS Word is excellent software. It really always has been. The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers. I also find the new "ribbon" to be a huge improvement over the nested tree navigation of the old Word. Microsoft found an innovative way to navigate and it works.

At home I have and use Open Office and it's just fine for simple documents and spreadsheets. There is no need to spend the money for Office for simple tasks with OO.O works fine.

The thing to complain about Word is the exclusion of other formats to maintain their monopoly (this is being fixed) and their attempt to force their convoluted XML format on the world over all other formats.

Re:PDFs?

[ivan256]

Excellent software?

It's bloated, underperforming, and not significantly more featured than things that were on the market a decade ago. The new "ribbon" interface is the re-implementation of WordStar 3 for DOS keyboard shortcuts, except with the mouse and icons instead of function keys and a cardboard overlay. They have a steep "learning" curve until you find out where everything you need is hidden, and they make the interface ridiculously un-intuitive for anybody who hasn't been using a Word-like word processor for the last 10 years. It also forces you onto an unending upgrade treadmill where you pay again for the next version even if you don't care about the new features simply so that you can continue to interoperate with others.

To top it off, it's really expensive.

Instead of "excellent", I think a better word would be "nightmareish", or "wretched".

Re:PDFs?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The price is a bargain. If you're a professional writer nothing else even comes close to the sophisticated features it offers.

Are you serious? I believe MS Word has its uses, and though I'm ambivalent about the new design, I can understand how some might find it useful. The point is, I'm not a Word hater at all. I've used it for many years, and I still do at times.

But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?

If, by "professional writer" you actually mean "book designer" or something similar who is actually concerned with formatting the text, then Word's typography and design choices are just awful compared to the output of professional software (InDesign and Quark, which are admittedly expensive, or the free LaTeX). And if you're an independent writer who has to both produce text and format it, and you need a GUI, free programs like LyX and Kile can easily provide almost all the features of Word.

What "sophisticated features" do "professional writers" need that Word has, but other software (and even free software) doesn't? I don't think Word is bad, but I just don't understand the claim that nothing else "comes close."

Re:PDFs?

[wjousts]

It also forces you onto an unending upgrade treadmill where you pay again for the next version even if you don't care about the new features simply so that you can continue to interoperate with others.

Now that is FUD, plain and simple. With their latest change in file formats (to docx), Microsoft even put out free to download converters that worked at least back to Word XP (which was what we were stuck with at work at the time). One of MS' biggest problems has been people not willing to upgrade. Office 2007's biggest competitor is Office 2003.

Re:PDFs?

[wjousts]

We're stuck with Lotus Notes (and what a nightmare that POS is), and we still use Word. Outlook isn't the reason for Word's popularity.

I dream of the day we switch to Outlook!

Re:PDFs?

[eldepeche]

Uh, have you ever seen Wikipedia? It's pretty well formatted. No one is talking about going from Word to Notepad.

Re:PDFs?

[tonyt3]

I think your last comment contradicts your basic statement. People don't upgrade because they do not need to and because the new program is expensive. Why upgrade? If all you need is operability with something new that M/S has done, they should supply that. All Open Source programs would do that. A cash cow is designed to make money. t

Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

So, the fact one does not need to make as many printouts abrogates the need for a good text processor. I see. That is like saying "Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, I don't need a car. At all. Ever."

Re:Stupid conclusions

[kriebz]

Are you calling Word a good text processor?

While it may have a lot of features, be already well-known by users, and have a large install base, that doesn't automatically mean it qualifies as a "good text processor". Software has a lifecycle, and any program is going to have features that make it over-specialized or less modern compared to newer contenders.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

It's beyond that... it's like saying that because one person living in New York can take the subway, it means that all other forms of transportation for the entire world should be permanently eliminated.

I hate to say it, but there is this place outside the blogosphere called "reality" where people do this stuff called "work". Word processors are vital to getting "work" done, because (and I know that this will shock you so sit down) there are documents that actually require "formatting" and have to look professional. Not to hate on your 3-word wide single column blog with a hipster-orange border trim, but in the land of "reality" people tend to expect somewhat better.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[MozeeToby]

Actually, it's more like saying "Because I live within walking distance to work and walk to work, no one needs a car. At all. Ever."

Re:Stupid conclusions

[DaveV1.0]

Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?

If so, would you care to support that assertion?

Re:Stupid conclusions

[toleraen]

Sounds like you live in the middle of nowhere, which means you should have plenty of room to raise your own livestock and grow your own grain and vegetables. You can make that trip to the general store on Sundays, should be able to put in your order through Sears, Roebuck and Co at the same time. Giddyup.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[kcfoxie]

I'd venture to say that MILLIONS of people would agree with the thinking on the car.

Re:Stupid conclusions

[PitaBred]

What, you mean the one that they tried to buy ISO certification of? Yeah, that's something I'd trust my data to. "FormatLikeWord95" or whatnot is unacceptable in a document format.

It might die, but not swiftly

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die. Even if it does it wont die swiftly.

I really don't want Microsoft or Word to be dead and be replaced by another monoculture. Just inter operate nicely with non patent encumbered, open, software. We will live in peace.

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[Pop69]

You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them ?

Re:It might die, but not swiftly

[AndrewNeo]

Woo! I'm one of eleven! (A better question is, how many people, myself included, like the ribbon interface better than the terrible tangle that was the menu system?)

Umm What?

[ae1294]

Word wasn't the first son.... and word processing isn't something you just use to 'print' stuff. It never was just about that. This isn't news, and this article doesn't even make sense...

Why did this end up on the front page of /.?

Re:Umm What?

[Alascom]

Sure Word wasn't the first, I used SpeedScript on my C64, WordStar, and others. But the author has a very valid point. The whole original purpose of word processing was to replace the type-writer, which only produced printed documents. With a word processor, it was easy to make edits, print multiple copies, save copies, etc.

The "Word" processor was never intended to be a format or procotol for transferring electronic documents, which is how its being used today.

Word is the IDE of writers

[Anonymous Coward]

Look around. See any typewriters? That's because MS Word made it so convenient fro writers to use a computer. Auto spelling correction, multiple document control and integration, collaborative tools: bells and whistles to most people but bread and butter to writers.
And yes, Open Office works "just like MS Word". But isn't that the point? OO needs to work like something and MS Word is a great starting point.

Re:Word is the IDE of writers

[flyingfsck]

Never heard of WordStar have you? or WordPerfect, or...

No chance MS Word is gone ...

[neonprimetime]

Maybe the traditional office will die out soon in favor of an online version such as Office Live, but in general MS Word is here to stay ... not going away anytime soon.

For example, there was a small business daycare that I know of that had Open Office installed on their work computers. Keep in mind that OO is free ... no cost. Still, the owners hated it so much, they just weren't used to it and got frustrated enough that even in these tough economic times, they went out and forked over the cash for a copy of MS Word. Of course that's sad, but it happens every day with non-techies.

MS Word dying is simply wishful thinking ... but it's not reality.

Moron! Word is a word processor

[o TINY o]

Some of us actually do more than just email short statements to friends these days. In fact, I suspect that this user might think email is on its way out, since according to this same logicl, email doesn't do anything more than a blog, twitter, chatting, or Facebook can't do. On my school campus, we don't always have to print. However, when we don't, we still write/prepare the documents in word, and then attach them to an email, or print them as a PDF. Either way, Word is still instruemental in the writing, formatting, reviewing, and etc, of that document. There is no acceptable alternative to Word. Open Office Word is ok at best. Google docs is ok, but it is web based. Until someone attempts to take on the almighty Word (highly unlikely due to its universal use across both PC and Mac platforms) - then Word is here to stay.

On the other side, 3D pie charts...

[leonbloy]

... should die a slow and horrible death.

Guy's Got a Very Narrow Frame of Reference

[RobotRunAmok]

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

Tell that to the Big Boy publishing industry, who still predominantly take queries and submissions only in hard copy handed to them by a postal worker. It's changing, but glacially...

Dumb premises make dumb conclusions

[grasshoppa]

The premise that because someone's purpose for using Office 20 years ago is relevant to today's office use is, frankly, moronic.

There are literally millions of ways people use the Office suite, and I'd hazard a guess that the printability of their work is a nice feature, but not the primary reason.

Stupid argument.

Word sucks, but it doesn't

[OrangeTide]

As long as you don't step outside of the capabilities of Word and WYSIWYG word processing in general (I am avoiding calling these systems an "editor") then they do just fine. Millions of people put together short to medium length documents on Word all the time, they didn't die from it. And they didn't find it so difficult that they had to search for a better way.

The learning curve to systems like LaTeX is very steep, but you have a tremendous amount of control over the formatting and layout. With WYSIWYG it can be a bit mysterious at times what formatting was applied where. In many ways I find structured documents more powerful than macro driven typesetting systems, although their features can also complement one another (like using DocBook or XSLT to generate TeX).

Personally I don't think printing versus not printing is some fundamental paradigm shift that it affects the popularity of Word. I think it is more because of the emergence of new software packages (like wikis, blogs, etc) combined with people being far more computer literate than they were 10-20 years ago.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[relguj9]

LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out.

It can handle very long documents just fine if you use the program appropriately.

Change the view to "Outline" to get a glimpse of some of the larger document capabilities and how to really control the formatting (which you can do, it's just a learning curve to figure it out). You can actually have subsections of a master document stored on separate servers with different permission levels for editing. I've helped make and used 1000 page manuals in Word without much trouble.

Combine that with how well it really does integrate with Excel and how easy it is to bring images in, etc... and I don't see Word going anywhere anytime soon.

Sorry to sound like a Microsoft fanboi or whatever, but Word is a more powerful tool than most give it credit for or bother to figure out, since a lot of its capability is kind of "hidden" to make it user friendly out of the box.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[serviscope_minor]

LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out. ...

You can actually have subsections of a master document stored on separate servers with different permission levels for editing

And this is why many of us perfer the unix way. LaTeX, for instance does nothing except typeset documents. If you want whacky permissioning and etc, then you can use one of many fine version control systems. As an added bonus, that knowledge can be re-used for programs and so on.

One tool one job, etc.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[pz]

LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out.

There are two major issues I hit every single time I use MS Word (and given that I'm in a branch of Biology for my professional life, this usage is very frequent):

(1) It has a lot of bugs. Cross references get scrambled or just disappear. Moving figures around screws up the figures. The layout tools never seem to make sense, or to do rational things. It needlessly repaginates far too often. When I hit "PgDn" it goes not-quite-but-sometimes-almost a full page down. Fonts get continually screwed up. Formatting gets continually lost or weirdly modified.

(2) The default behavior on nearly every control is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but so brain-dead as to leave me often screaming: "in what world view is that the right thing to do, in what universe does that make sense?" I can feel my blood start to boil just writing this. When I start a new document, I half expect the language to be reset to Ancient Sanskrit (OK, that part about Sanskrit was hyperbole, but I can often be found screaming at MS Word because of the brain-dead defaults).

Contrast this with a program of at least comparable complexity like Adobe Photoshop. I know both of those programs about equally well -- which is to say casually. I think I've seen a bug in Photoshop maybe twice, perhaps three times total. Ever. (With MS Word, it's three every 10 minutes.) While the default behavior on tools might not be the best, at least they MAKE SENSE. With MS Word, I have the deep feeling that the program is fundamentally unknowable because there are no guiding principles to its operation. In contrast, with Photoshop, I suspect that with sufficient patience, I can learn to do amazing things because there is a fundamental organization waiting to be discovered.

There's no fundamental reason MS Word can't be a great program. All it needs is a pioneering visionary to thrash it down to a working core, to develop some well thought out guiding principles for how to organize the interface, to mercilessly eliminate the rampant bugs, to study how the current interface fails, and to rebuild it from that working core back up to a well-engineered product. But will that happen? Unlikely.

Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't

[jma05]

And consequently, the user base of LaTeX to that of MS Word is just about proportional to the ownership of super sonic jet pilots to that of bicycle users :-).

Re:Why dont I need word?

[TemporalBeing]

Because I have OpenOffice. It is just as good.

And free.

Um yeah, until Oracle kills it next year.

Oracle can't really kill OpenOffice. They could kill Star Office, but OpenOffice would be a lot harder to do since anyone else could quickly pick it up and continue on.
Yes, I realize that most of the devs for OpenOffice are part of Sun, but if they all got laid off, they could easily band together and pick up a fork of OpenOffice if they so desired.
Of if Oracle tried to kill OpenOffice some random group of people could fork OpenOffice and continue on too.

So no, it's not that easy.

WordPerfect was better anyway

[wandazulu]

Th FA talks about laughing at WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS users, but as one of those users, I never ever wondered why the font suddenly changed (and always to Times New Roman, no matter what I set my default to), or why pages suddenly ended for no reason, or why widows and orphans basically just didn't work. "Reveal Codes" was WordPerfect's killer feature that saved me hours of frustration (that I got back and more when I had to switch to Word) in that I could tell exactly where the "bad" code was and remove it.

When the Web and HTML came along, I initially thought the designers had used WP as their inspiration.

The other thing WP 5.1 had was the ultimate in minimalist interface; the lower right hand corner had the page, line and word position and nothing else. The closest to a blank sheet of paper I've ever had in writing software. The FA also laughs at all the function key combos, but in reality you only used a few (Shift-F7 comes to mind...).

Also, WP had, at the time, the best support...an 800-number and all the free tech/user support you could want. It's no exaggeration to say that their support helped me learn WP macro programming.

Sigh, okay, everyone off my lawn...I have to get back to my TPS reports; I accidentally saved them in docx format and have to re-save them all as .doc so people with Word 2007 can read them.

Realists vs idealists

[zerofoo]

Every day I read about how the world should be: wind and solar farms generating electricity, no more fossil fuels, everyone living in cities and can walk/bike to everything they need - and no more commercial, closed software - free and open software for all.

These are all nice ideas, but they fail in the exact same way - they aren't practical for most people.

We are going to burn every drop of financially viable fossil fuels that are in the ground - the sooner engineers and environmentalists accept that fact, the sooner we can start working toward REAL solutions to our energy problems (nuclear has my vote).

A world without Microsoft office, or Microsoft products in general might be a nice vision of your utopia, but for the vast majority of computer users, they are happy shelling out the cash for a refined product that they are comfortable using.

I like free and open products whenever possible, but replacing many Microsoft products, that people are comfortable with, has enormous costs beyond mere dollars.

-ted

Re:Why dont I need word?

[gothzilla]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.

And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[westlake]

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.

There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.

It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.

Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.

Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.

This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.
     

Re:Why dont I need word?

[palegray.net]

I don't think you understand how these things work. It's the same as the fear-mongering over the fate of MySQL. There is no issue; OpenOffice is deployed by default on a huge number of Linux distributions. It's a certainty that dev teams from a variety of backgrounds would maintain it even it Oracle completely stopped caring.

This has nothing to do with "Client - Server - The Web."

Re:Why don't I need word?

[Deep Orange]

I love Open Office

In many ways it's superior to MS Office but it does have one great downfall and that is MS Office, more to the point the MS Office format. I've used both programs extensively for the last couple years and one thing that I've found is that if you modify a .doc file with Open Office and then pass it off to someone who's going to use MS there is a very good chance that the .doc will have some horrible formating issues. I know lot's of OOffice lovers (read as MS bashers) will tell you that it looks just fine when they open it up and have no problems but thats not the issue, if you if you go MS with that document thats when it's messed up and makes you look like a fool. If I'm going to build a PDF or make a document to be printed I'll use OOffice every time but I've been force to use MS Office most of the time just to keep my documents from getting mangled.

The only way to fix this would be to get MS to open up the .doc format (not going to happen) or to get the whole world to switch off MS Office (honestly think that opening up .doc would be easier). Yes yes I'm sure lots of MS bashers out there love that second option but with the entire US government and the vast majority of businesses everywhere locked on MS it's not going to change anytime soon and wishfully thinking isn't going to change it.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[amorsen]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened.

It sounds like OpenOffice did quite a bit better than a different version of MS Office would have done. Exchanging documents between Office versions is a neverending source of "fun".

Re:Missing the point

[Tom]

Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of /. is beyond me...

Because 14 years ago, you couldn't have deployed that technology in an office and moved everyone including the secretary to use it. Today you can, and that's the news.

Actually, it's still a bit of early adopter thing, strange as that may sound. The combination will become really popular when IBM (or some other big name) picks it up, calls it something buzzwordy, and sells it to the clueless execs for a ridiculous amount of money.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[turbidostato]

"In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch."

That's plain bullshit as facts themselves demonstrate once and again. Companies have gone through the Microsoft Office upgrade mill once and again since the days of Office 4 onwards (about 1994) and you can bet those upgrades were far away from 99.9999% compatible and even 99.999%, 99.99%, 99.9%, 99% or even 90% (you haven't gone through the Word/Excel/Access macros/apps upgrade nightmare, have you?) and still companies did it just because "it's time to do it".

Re:Word should never have been "in".

[TheRaven64]

The problem you have with Word is you don't know how to use it.

No, the problem with Word is that it makes using it incorrectly easier than using it correctly. Coincidentally, this is also the problem with a great many other pieces of software, including programming languages. Blaming the user is easier than fixing the interface though.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Dan Ost]

It is not "just as good." I attempted to switch my company from MS Office to Open Office. We came across one spreadsheet it butchered to hell when it opened. It opened all the rest just fine but that one. In a business environment 99.9999% compatible isn't good enough. If a program can't open one file then there is no reason to switch.

MS Office isn't even 99.9999% compatible with it's previous versions, so by your definition, it's not worth using...and yet you clearly think it is worth using.

It may work just fine for individual use, but in an enterprise environment when you constantly transfer documents between hundreds of other companies Open Office is completely useless.

"completely useless" is clearly too strong a description. The people in our org who are constantly transferring documents between other orgs don't use MSOffice. They use MSOffice AND Openoffice.org AND Word Perfect AND...anything else they need to open. I've heard them comment that OOO will sometimes do a better job than MSOffice at opening old Word or Excel documents.

And yeah I've heard the whole "just keep one copy around in case" argument and it does not hold water in a business. People have a lot of work to do and anything that slows them down, even if it is only by a few minutes, is unacceptable.

If you think your people are being 100% utilized, either you're misinformed or nobody wants to work for you (or both). 3 minutes out of a day gets lost in the noise of the work day. Do you allow your workers to take "potty breaks" during the day or only on their lunch hour?

Re:DOSBOX + WordPerfect 5.1

[TheRaven64]

DOSBox can't print, but WordPerfect had a print-to-file option. You can use this with a generic PostScript printer driver to get a PostScript file and then print this with Preview from OS X (or just convert it to PDF for online distribution). You may also be able to find a PDF printer driver for WordPerfect, but I've not looked.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

A web browser isn't simple, but word processing is on a whole other level in terms of complexity. Pause and think about how many more features a word processor has than a web browser. By and large, a web browser presents information. On the other hand, a Word Processor has all of the complexities of handling layout that a web browser does (and I would argue it has more when you get to adding things like symbols and formulas), but in addition has to handle the editing of all these bajillion permutations of input in a sane and efficient way.
As a case in point, consider that a KDE team of a few people managed to produce KHTML which is a passable rendering engine even now that it has been overshadowed by webkit. On the other hand, a large KDE team with some corporate backing has failed to produce a word processor (KWord) that can even be said to be in the same league as OO.o, let along MS Word.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Foredecker]

Yes they could. But would they? If they tried, then how would they get paid? Contrary to popular believe - nobody works for free. Yes, someone may get paid for doing something other than contributing to a project, but they have to do something for a living. If a person is not getting paid to contribute to a project, then the time they get to spend on the project will be limited.

Re:You are wrong

[hcdejong]

Word was targeted at professional writers... people writing books and technical manuals and the like. That's why it had as many pre-press features as it did, that's why it was as expensive as is was,

No. It was targeted at general office use, and got more and more features tacked on as Microsoft tried to increase the number of markets it could 'serve' with Word.
Pre-press features? Microsoft shot themselves in the foot from the get-go on that one. Having your document auto-reformat itself when you select a different printer means that Word documents are invariably greeted with derision and groaning by printing houses.
Technical manuals in Word? only if you want to kill the poor writer. There's no way to enforce consistent formatting, it's unstable when documents get large, there's no way to share information between documents, its graphics handling sucks, there's no way to publish variants (multiple similar books) from a single source, and I could go on. If Microsoft targeted Word at professional writers they did a job so spectacularly awful it makes Clippy seem brilliant by comparison.

hdj (technical writer)

Not using styles must die, not Word itself.

[master_p]

The major problem with Word is that it allows the creation of on-the-fly styles while typing. For example, when I type with normal style, using Ctrl+B will add a new style to the document: normal + bold. This easy creation and modification of styles creates a style nightmare. I have seen documents with over 500 different styles, as a result of the document being passed around in various home and abroad offices and partners.

Word should be strict about its types. Either you use an existing type or create a new one from the beginning. That will limit the amount of hacks people do in order to format their documents.

I third this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep a copy of Open Office around - just in case.

I've had times where my wife couldn't convert between versions of MS Office. I used Open Office to open/save - and it fixed the issue. However, I don't believe Open Office is the bees knees (mind you, I like the fact that you can modify the XML directly using notepad to recover corruptions, which I needed to do once).

I've worked for large organisations for the last 15 years that primarily deals with large and complex documents.
I can guarentee you that almost EVERYONE I work with has wasted significant effort due to Microsoft mal-formatting, incompatibilities, normal.dot corruptions, etc.

To the grandparent poster, you've got to be kidding me that most businesses would not tolerate wasted time. Most engineers waste their time on a weekly basis in Word. My current project has over 100 people on it - and people periodically ask "why do we use this crap"... The usual cry of frustration heard is most often another "Wordism".

For the record, the project "know it all" says that it's peoples' ineptitude that breaks MS Word. I showed him a clean document, using "paste as text" that caused documents to corrupt. His response was "well, that's not the way I would do it". I need that advice like a hole in the head.

Ditch this crap product. I've suffered this fool too many years.

AC

Re:Why Word didn't have "reveal codes".

[bcboy]

err... Word docs crud up with invisible mark-up, as well. It isn't relevant that the underlying mechanism is different. With no "reveal" option, it can be infuriating trying to find and delete the invisible things so the formatting will be correct.

Cost is not Value

[benwaggoner]

But "a bargain" when other free office suites, text editors, and numerous word processors are available? I'm also just not sure what "sophisticated features" it has that a "professional writer" needs. If, by "professional writer," you mean someone actually producing text, the main needs are a good text editor, which can be found many places. You might want spell check and a thesaurus, things like find and replace, etc., which can be found in many text editors. Word's support for text substitution and advanced text editing features is rather limited, unless you write macros (which I personally think are easier in something like LaTeX). If you have need for footnotes, citations, cross references, etc., I would say that (a) Word's bibliographic support is pretty bad by itself, though when used with other software and plugins, it becomes useful, and (b) the support for cross references, etc. is minimal compared to the options given in some other software. If you collaborate, you need to track changes, but any good word processor does that today. What else does someone just producing text need?

ValueCost.

What does the Student/Home version of Word cost? $80? If you use it for 10 hours a week for a year, that works out to $0.08 an hour. Total rounding error for anyone who makes money writing, and pays for itself many times over even if it only boosts productivity 5%.

As for Word, I'd say its deep strengths are in easy, productive composition of structured prose, plus great revision and collaboration features. And it's not just about feature-to-feature checklist, but about how all the features work together and are preseted. I've never seen anything that can easily defork two different revisions of the same document like Word, comparing and letting you pick change-by change with all the variants on screen at once.

While it's no layout powerhouse, it works very well for making structured documents if style sheets are used correctly, which can them be enhanced in LaTeX, InDesign or whatever.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[NoOneInParticular]

I have, on three seperate occasions, saved the work of some poor student that wrote some math-heavy document in MS-Word. What happened was that Word saved the doc, but couldn't open it anymore. The freaking program was not even compatible with itself! What I managed to do was open the document in openoffice, and save it again. At that point Word could open it again.

Apparently this never happened to you, because you would have thrown out Word right away. Right? Right?

Of course you wouldn't, despite your rhetoric about business actually being rational, you would have been thrown out before they would even consider moving away from ms-office.

Re:Why dont I need word?

[Draek]

Your problem is that you're using a propietary, undocumented and ever-changing format to store information that you don't want altered. Office 2001 opens incorrectly Office 2000 documents more often than not, despite being theoretically just a port to the Mac platform of the same codebase, with the 2003 and 2008 versions its only worse.

The only format I know of that actually guarantees your documents will still look the same a decade from now is TeX. No, not LaTeX, pure, vanilla, Knuth-sponsored TeX. Use anything else and you'll be lucky to get something 95% compatible in the next version, let alone 99.9999%.