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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."
With that argument, PDFs would be the thing to die, not MS Word.
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."
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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 /.?
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.
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.
... 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.
... but it's not reality.
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
MS Word dying is simply wishful thinking
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.
... should die a slow and horrible death.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
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.
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.
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.
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".
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
"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".
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?
*sigh* back to work...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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%.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.