20 Years of MS Word and Why It Should Die a Swift Death 843
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ScuttleMonkey
from the going-the-way-of-old-yeller dept.
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."
Oh, he doesn't need Word anymore? (Score:5, Funny)
Is that so? Good for him.
I printed his article... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It might die, but not swiftly (Score:5, Funny)
600 million to 1 billion people use Word, around 45 people worldwide actually have any clue how to use it. Around 11 people understand how to use it with the "ribbon interface".
Re:Umm What? (Score:5, Funny)
Why did this end up on the front page of /.?
You must be new here.
I have a theory... (Score:5, Funny)
i believe
Emacs (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why dont I need word? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Stupid conclusions (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs, you insensitive clod.
You mispelled Vi.
Re:Stupid conclusions (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying that Word is not a good text processor?
If so, would you care to support that assertion?
Sure! Word is an evil text processor. good != evil, therefore, Q.E.D.
Re:Stupid conclusions (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Stupid conclusions (Score:2, Funny)
Emacs, you insensitive clod.
You mispelled ed.
Fixed that for you.
Re:Umm What? (Score:3, Funny)
Simple math:
MS: +10
Word: +5
die: +5
swift death: +5
God forgive me but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Guy doesn't work at a college, obviously (Score:5, Funny)
but the print count continues to climb, every single year.
How are things going over there at the US Mint?
Re:You are wrong (Score:1, Funny)
Not sure we should take your opinion on word processors seriously, given that you seperate paragraphs with full stops.
Re:Word sucks, but it doesn't (Score:3, Funny)
Augh, you missed a perfectly good chance to use the "correlation is not causation" meme!
The first bug I found in MS Word. (Score:3, Funny)
Back when it first showed up on the Mac, I found that if you have a heading and a paragraph with different font characteristics, and you place the cursor before the first character in the paragraph, and then hit backspace and delete the newline between the heading and the paragraph, the whole paragraph suddenly gets the heading's text attributes.
Since that time, several Microsoft apologists have tried to tell me that it's supposed to work like that. Sorry, but if I can affect the typeface ahead of the cursor by hitting backspace, that's a monumental fuck up by the software vendor.
-jcr
Re:On the other side, 3D pie charts... (Score:3, Funny)