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In the early days, Word's primary purpose was to ready a document so that you could print it out. To figure this out, I tried to go back to basics and think about what Word was originally designed to do.

So why don't I need Word any more? Print, out! I've written about this before, but the short version is that Word's document format will always be complicated, even if it is natively XML and completely open, simply because it has to support all the thousands of features that Word itself provides. We all want to feel pretty and important, so we'll all just keep using Word forever, and people will just have to deal with the ugly complexities of translating Word's complicated document format into manageable XML or other interchange formats. Word not only has tons of features, but it lets you make documents that look pretty and important.
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True, people claim to pine for the "good old days" when software was less complicated, and they insist that Word 5 was the greatest version of Word ever written, but their actions at the cash register negate their words. This is an almost universal law of software: if it weren't true, software companies could never sell new versions of their products, because most people would already be satisfied with what they had. In general, people prefer software with more features. It's actually somewhat astonishing to learn how many features Microsoft added in each version.įor the longest time I was firmly in the camp that believed people would always want to use tools like Word because they offered so many features.
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Jensen Harris has a great series of posts examining the history of Word's user interface and the reasoning for the UI rewrite.

Word 95 was really just Word 6 with red squiggle spell checking and long filenames, and after that things pretty much stayed the same until Word 2007, when Microsoft changed the entire user interface because it was getting too hard to find all the new features they kept cramming in. (Macintosh Word 6 users, I'm sure, have no sympathies).
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Word for Windows 1.1 was a delight, with the transition to a GUI interface, then Word for Windows 2.0 both pleased me with a bevy of new features and frustrated me because it took twice the RAM just to get up in the morning. I used to laugh at the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS people, with their silly keyboard templates and inscrutable function-key combinations-I had proper menus and italic text that really looked italic! Of course I also had slow scrolling speeds in graphics mode to view those italics, and bizarre text transitions that would happen when I deleted invisible formatting commands. Around 1987 I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS, version 3.0. From there I jumped to DOS machines and the famous WordStar, once the most popular word processor of all time.

The first word processor I ever used was a combination of the PIE text editor and the TEXT formatter, both for CP/M, almost thirty years ago, back when computers were powered by tiny pterodactyls in cages. "You know, I've been using Word for over 20 years," I said, and immediately felt older than dirt. I was having dinner with friends the other day and we started talking about word processing programs we'd all used in office jobs.
