Slashdot Mirror
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."
The main reason to use word is that everyone else is using it already. Oh, and its overcomplicated, obsolete-by-design "feature" of file format incompatibility.
And an anecdote about it: During a computer science course one of the tutors told us about his visit to the MS Word engineering team. There he saw a white board with bug numbers. The white board was titled "Not fixable."
MS has owned the market for this for a while, controlling it's market share via FUD and broken file formats, ultimately installing MS tax for business decision makers that are too scared to lose compatibility with their old documents and interoperability with other business.
It's working.
Yes, we don't really need it, but we can't kick the habit either.
Why is it sad that they forked out cash for a program that does what they want in they way they wanted it done? While Open Office is free, not all costs are counted in cash dollars. (I've tried three times to shift from Word to OO, and given up in frustration each time.)
I find it annoying the number of 'techies' who refuse to understand that people can and do make their decisions based on things other than politics and religion. Some techies (read "much of Slashdot) are worse than fundies when it comes down to looking down their collective noses at those who don't worship at the same altar they do.
But maybe not for the same reasons.
In '95, I remember a review, perhaps in PC Mag, that noted that 90% of all the users of word processors used 10% of the features; of the 10% of users that used more, they used them perhaps 10% of the time.
That was 14 years ago.
How many of the "advanced features" do any of you use? Are you writing documents, or are you doing desktop publishing for printing out?
The real point of a word processor was not to "ready documents to show to someone higher up than me", it was to replace a typewriter. My old criteria for evaluating word processors was whether I could sit down with it for the first time, never having seen it before, and could type up a letter and print it out in five minutes.
Which, of course, was why I *loathed* Wordstar. WordPerfect, I didn't like... until 5.0. Then, I loved it. If I could, I'd use WP today. For one thing, there was the 'reveal all codes" function, that showed ALL CODES, inline, not some codes (say, not including "this paragraph is right justified") and on, and on, that Word does, where I've had to *fight it* to edit a document. For that matter, the way WP did codes, I'm astounded that they didn't go to saving and markup using HTML, since their codes could have almost gone 1-to-1.
Oh, that's right, their marketing and management couldn't market their way out of a wet paper back with the Terminator's help.
And they keep "improving" it, because even though most of us will *never* use the NEW, GREATER FEATURES (tm), they can sell more copies, rather than people using the same program, year in and year out.
So, let's see: how many years did typewriters, all of which did the same thing, last? 90 years or so, and the only real "improvement" was going electric, so you could type faster?
Why do we need a word processor to sing and dance? Are you creating something for Youtube in it?
mark, who'd like a non-M$ emulator word processor
the people that pay us like Outlook
Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?
What I think you meant was an employer typically rewards conformity over innovation. PHB's are typically strict conformists themselves. NOT using Outlook inspires uncertainty, so you won't be as well rewarded come annual evaluation.
its simpler to have them use the whole Office suite than just part of it.
And the cost of wasted productivity fixing the myriad of rendering bugs are not borne by PHB's either. This is a variation on the Broken Windows parable.
The article only begins to touch the more important point. The nature of document workflow is changing and think ordinary schmoes like this are catching onto the changing and how irrelevant Microsoft has become. They are still relevant for their biggest customers, so it won't happen in my lifetime. But the beginning of a long, slow decline of the relevance of Microsoft is upon us.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Right, users don't like OO so they must be stupid and lazy. You're exactly the kind of slashdotter I was referring to in my original post.