20 Years of MS Word and Why It Should Die a Swift Death

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday August 3, 2009 @05:04AM from the going-the-way-of-old-yeller dept.

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."

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Re:No chance MS Word is gone ... by DerekLyons · 2009-08-03 06:00 · Score: 1, Troll

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.
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.