
Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009 - mhansen
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983---2009-rest-in-peace.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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DanielBMarkham
This article has a nice tone, but I think the author makes a lot of
generalizations by simply applying his current job/situation to the world at
large. Specifically, I disagree with the following:

1) The world is going paperless. Alas, this is not happening. While it's true
that some areas, like technical writing and review, _have_ made progress
towards this goal, printer supplies remain a truly lucrative market.

2) People prefer software with fewer features. Yes, it's true that _people_
prefer a simple program that does simple things, _organizations_ have laundry
lists of things they want and tend to buy the thing that does the most for the
cheapest, even if there is overlap (insert long rant about organizational
purchasing here)

3) The page metaphor is dead -- it's all web now. This would be great if it
were true, but I seriously doubt it. Lots of people (like me) prefer a hard
copy of work when editing. In addition, pages give reference points during
conversation, stuff like "check out the first sentence in the third paragraph
on page 3" which gets very unwieldy without pages

4) Superior collaboration software translates into superior document creation
software. Wiki is great. Love it. But in lots of places, like law offices,
when you create a document, _it has a very specific legal status_. It must be
kept for a period of time. It must not be edited without a clear trail of
edits. Etc. For folks in the healthcare, legal, and insurance world (among
others) documents are simply electronic versions of printed pages that have a
lot of rules associated with them. This isn't a societal convention as much as
it is a legal one. Good luck on getting that changed anytime soon.

Word is a feature-heavy monster, no doubt about it. Nobody uses 99% of all
that stuff in there. But there's a long way from making that observation to
officiating at its funeral.

The rumors of Word's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

~~~
rawr
I think this is spot-on.

From a student's perspective, taking notes in class in Word is the de facto
standard at this point. The outlining mode is intuitive and efficient.

Now let's say we were to replace this with MediaWiki. When I tab and shift-tab
it won't indent and un-indent properly. While I'm sure there is Wiki markup to
do outlining, there is no way you'd be able to do it fast enough in class
while you're trying to get down everything the professor says.

The author, as parent points out, makes the common mistake of assuming what is
true for one in a group is true for the entire group.

~~~
coliveira
I still use word for some things, but taking quick notes is not one of them.
Pure text is the best way to take quick notes, because you don't have to worry
about formatting (and using the mouse to do formatting). If you learn how
wikimedia works, it is probably easier than writing in word...

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zargon
"Pages are dead"... but his article is divided into two pages?

~~~
twopoint718
I get the irony, but I suppose here it is so that the ads all get a second
hit.

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daeken
I completely agree with the premise of this article, but this line baffles me:
... 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.

This is akin to saying that binary has to be complicated because of all the
numbers it can represent. Most features don't require a file format change in
any way, even when storing, say, undo histories for new features. Word
documents really aren't that complicated, unless they're made to be.

~~~
socratees
You must do some research on how complex OOXML is.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML> .Initially there was a huge
opposition in making OOXML a open standard, but eventually Microsoft succeeded
in pushing the standard. Ever wondered why a empty word document's size is ~34
KB?

~~~
daeken
I'm not arguing that it _isn't_ complex, I'm arguing that the feature-set of
Word has nothing to do with the complexity of the file format by necessity.
His assertion that the feature-set of Word is what makes it complex is simply
foolish.

~~~
jballanc
It's true that any _arbitrary_ file format's complexity doesn't _necessarily_
have to be tied to the feature set of the authoring tool (e.g. LaTeX), but in
this case much of the extraneous complexity of OOXML _is_ tied to Word's
feature set. In particular, the need for backward compatibility with features
from previous versions of Word make this format more complex than it needs to
be, given the current feature set.

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chanux
I'm happy with Latex & Google docs.

Anyway, well done MS Office.

~~~
_pi
I agree, the main reason (besides the fact that LaTeX is the greatest for any
type of document, and that greatness is extended by XeTeX,) is because I still
believe one must have good file structure. As much as CMSes and Wikis are the
rage today in web trendiness, you still need to manually organize them in some
way, and this doesn't solve the problem that the article hints at about
sticking them on a network share. If it's gonna be lost in a network share
it's gonna be lost in a wiki or a CMS. The difference is you might not be
running an indexing service for your docs on the network share but searching
is intrinsic to the wiki.

And also, git for tracking changes, version control isn't simple, I find that
MediaWiki's version control is more annoying to use than git.

~~~
catzaa
Outlines in Word is excellent for ensuring that a document has excellent
structure.

I use latex a lot (more than Word) yet people do not see its limitations. It
would be best if Latex is replaced with something like open source Adobe
Framemaker or something.

~~~
joeyo
LaTeX has limitations?

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lallysingh
Office 2007 just got installed on my box at work, and the first thing I saw
was a blue haze of controls and tabs that just confused me to no end.

When the feature set is as mature as what Office has, replacing the UI makes
for more "look how old my current version is!" fodder for upgrades, but
doesn't do much for making people on the fence want to stay with the product.

Then again, I am curious to know what the penetration levels are for various
wiki products vs Word in the business market. I just can't imagine large non-
computer companies embracing wikis terribly quickly. Word documents as data
transfer still provide a simple and easy-to-understand model for how to write
and share, even if it's a pain-in-the-ass in actual use.

If wikis want to replace word effectively, they'll need something like an
Adobe AIR client. Web browsers are nice for lots of things, but I've nearly
pulled my disks out and punted them across the room when an extra
tab/backspace causes the browser to go back a page.

~~~
gaius
As I say above, a "real" word processor is much more than a text editor with
WYSIWYG formatting. Anyone who works on reasonably complex documents would
expect their software to keep track of cross references to tables, figures,
sections, pages, etc. This is a feature than simply doesn't matter when
writing a letter or a CV which is probably what most people actually use a
word processor for. But Word 2007 has a whole tab devoted to just this, and
another whole tab devoted to change tracking. The people who need it _really_
need it, and ultimately they're the ones that decide what word processor the
organization uses. You might get them to switch to OpenOffice, but Google Docs
is _long_ way from ready for prime time.

~~~
lallysingh
But Word's pretty terrible at that stuff, too. I've nearly thermite'd my
machine when word screws up my styles or starts dancing with my inline images.
I've stuck to svn/latex/emacs for real docs. Word tries, but it's just
infuriating to make it put out a well-formatted, consistent document when you
hit over ~150 pages.

If you can do it, you've got sk1llz I don't.

~~~
gaius
Yeah, that's bloody annoying. But my point is: people who believe that Google
Docs is a viable substitute for Word (and OpenOffice, etc) are probably not
trying to write particularly complex documents, because if they were they'd
have run into missing features.

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socratees
Though Google Apps has very much less features compared to Office, a small
business could well operate perfectly just with Google Apps. I'm not sure what
percentage of Microsoft's revenues are generated by small businesses but
Microsoft is sure facing a tough competition this time. Any thoughts?

~~~
DrJokepu
I'm sure a lot of buinesses (small or large) find the idea of hosting their
documents (often containing business secrets or of critical importance) on the
servers of another entity very, very frightening.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I think this is a critical flaw, in this day of HIPAA and SarbOx. Any business
that allows someone else to store their data (or even process it) risks
personal responsibility for their officers -- and what corporate CTO is going
to risk that?

~~~
TomOfTTB
I don't buy this. I'm not an expert on S.O. but I'm close to one in regards to
HIPAA. As far as HIPAA is concerned as long as you have a Business Associate
Agreement that clearly spells out the privacy level expected from the other
party you aren't going to get in trouble for a HIPAA violation.

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limmeau
In a small company I worked for, we decided to put most of the internal
writing into our MediaWiki. Project plans, memos, design whitepapers, meeting
minutes, vacation plan, internal encyclopedia, FAQs for locally installed
tools etc.

Earlier, the company had installed a TWiki, which quickly filled up with
poorly-named pages. With a mandatory naming convention and readily available
copy-paste templates (I wish MediaWiki had MoinMoin-like templates), this was
no longer a problem.

It worked well for most of those things except for project plans (no way of
summing up those table cells). For external documentation however (we offered
consulting and engineering for safety-critical software), we used DocBook.

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Shorel
By the features and functionalities that he writes, the software that can kill
MS Word seems to be Google Wave.

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edw519
+1 for closed casket.

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drhowarddrfine
I had never given this any thought at all but totally agree with the article.
My company uses GoogleDocs for everything but rarely prints anything out. I'll
have to look into the wiki thing.

