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

Unfortunately, Microsoft has achieved lock-in.

[Futurepower(R)]

'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.'

That's our experience, also. The cost of changing is so high that companies will pay more or use inferior software.

A lot of the problem is not only with employee training, it is that training resources and employee time for training are inelastic. There is simply no arrangement that can be made that allows switching, other than hiring new employees.

However, if governments force standard file specifications the problem can be made to disappear.