Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009

"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.

Isn't that why we have URLs?

As to legal requirements, perhaps Word is insufficient for a system with such strict legal requirements? Maybe a wiki-ish system that strictly enforced all the necessary requirements without requiring humans intervention? But I guess you are saying that the way the laws are written actually require actual pieces of paper to exist. In which case software doesn't help.

I'm curious, though, to know if that is the case or if businesses have sprung up specifically to meet the legal requirements of electronic document management for those vertical industries.

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.

In the law office environment, Word fulfills at least the following functions:

1) It avoids incompatibility issues in document formatting (i.e., you know that, if you created it in Word, others in your own office and elsewhere will be able to open, use, modify, and save it without any problems - a critical item as documents are exchanged among different parties in a variety of ways in such an environment).

2) It fits in with document-management systems that allow you to create and store your documents, in all their different versions, on local servers that you control and with which you can preserve the confidentiality of client documents.

3) It provides a baseline for determining that new employees will be efficient in their word processing skills (i.e., they must have a minimum set of skills that includes being able to work efficiently in Word).

4) It does all the things the you point out in your items 1-4 (particularly your observations about being bound to the idea of the "page").

Any substitute for Word would need to leave me capable of interacting with clients, staff, fellow workers, opposing attorneys, courts, government agencies, etc. in this same seamless manner without incompatibilities while using the "page" model through which we all are accustomed to relating to one another.

Call it the pull of the legacy, but it is an overwhelming pull. Everything else is bleeding edge from the standpoint of having to run a real business in the current environment.

This does not mean it can never change, but it will not change based merely on an idealized set of ideas of how it can be done better or on something that might work in one environment but does not port well into the standard office.

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

The other way of phrasing that line is: to garentee that you can display any Word document, you need to be able to support any formatting that Word supports.

Parsing a Word document is much simpler than displaying a Word document, often people mean the latter when they say "open a Word document".

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?

There's a Joel on Software article that discusses this. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

Historically Office file formats have grown from in-memory structures serialized to disk which helps in part to explain the complexity of them.

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.

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.

Not just operate well enough, but operate better. All their work in one place, up on the web. Easy team-working. Easy sharing with the customer.

Docs still has ties to paper, though. The Google product that fits this model the best is Wave.

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.

Google Apps as distinct apps are dead men walking.

Their only future is as a collection of gadgets and robots for WAVE. WAVE simultaneously solves the problems of over-bloated office suites and Google Apps problem of not having a locally-hosted option.