I was having dinner with friends the other day and we started talking about word processing programs we'd all used in office jobs.

"You know, I've been using Word for over 20 years," I said, and immediately felt older than dirt.

But it was true.

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. From there I jumped to DOS machines and the famous WordStar, once the most popular word processor of all time. Around 1987 I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS, version 3.0.

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.

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. (Macintosh Word 6 users, I'm sure, have no sympathies). 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. Jensen Harris has a great series of posts examining the history of Word's user interface and the reasoning for the UI rewrite. It's actually somewhat astonishing to learn how many features Microsoft added in each version.

All in all, I've had a relationship with Microsoft Word for over two decades, with only a couple of brief dalliances with Ami Pro and DeScribe for OS/2 in between (they meant nothing to me—honest!) Thinking about how long I've used Word simply makes it all the more strange to realize that I don't need Word any more.

At all. Ever.

It's complicated

One of the great things about writing for the Web is that you get to contradict yourself, and both your initial statement and contradiction remain available forever for people to see and laugh at. My standard defense is that things change, and in our current world, change is happening faster than ever. Failing that, I fall back on the Whitman defense: "I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

For 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. In general, people prefer software with more features. 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. 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.

Word not only has tons of features, but it lets you make documents that look pretty and important. 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. 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.

So why don't I need Word any more?

Print, out!

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 thinking went something like this: I need to write my documents in Word because I want to share them with other people, and since everyone else has Word (sorry, WordPerfect fans) I'll need to use Word to make sure they can read my documents. Of course, thinking along these lines tended to end up with more people buying Word, something that Microsoft wasn't too upset about.

This led to a few people becoming very concerned about Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processing market, and in particular on the file format that Word used. Suddenly, it was a big deal that the Word format was a big binary blob, a sort of memory dump of whatever Word happened to be thinking about at the time. Despite the fact that all the makers of competing word processors had managed to do a passable job of converting .doc files for years, this was suddenly seen as a horribly unfair move by Microsoft that had to change. Even Microsoft thought the .doc format was a bad idea in an increasingly interconnected world, and started moving over to an XML-based format for Word 2003. The battle to establish Office XML as an ECMA and later an ISO standard, and the cries of proponents of the competing Open Office ODF XML format, became increasingly heated. This was suddenly an Epic War of File Formats, a fight to the death between the forces of good and evil, with good and evil being defined depending on whose side you were on.

What everyone had lost track of in the heat of battle was why we were still using Word (or OpenOffice Writer, which is—let's face it—just a clone of Word) to create documents that were likely never going to be printed.

Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8? by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called "Draft" that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to "Print Layout"—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to "know" what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.

Like many conventions of society (such as mutual gift-giving) we keep doing things in a certain way simply out of habit, long after the original need (a barter-based economy) has vanished. Think of how many people attach Word documents whenever they email a resume. Now, consider that Outlook uses Word as the default editor for email and think about just how silly this all is.