The Guardian’s Jason Wilson has joined has joined the large chorus of critics and commentators who have condemned Microsoft Word as a tool used by students, journalists and writers of all types. Rather grandiloquently, not to say prematurely, he has declared that “we” are winning the war on Word.
He makes some entirely reasonable points. The success of Microsoft Word owes more to its ubiquity as a key element of the dominant MS Windows platform during the PC explosion of the late 80’s and 90’s than demonstrable advantages in design or end-user responsiveness. As a long-term Word user, I’m well-acquainted with the frustrations of “feature bloat” wherein the newer versions contain features that replicate or supersede existing features (i.e Quick Parts vs AutoText), and yet the superseded features are still retained to keep faith with existing users. The result is that Word can seem at times an unwieldy beast that has far outgrown the needs of most writers, stacked with metadata, invisible code and largely redundant features that can distract and antagonise the average user.But the bile and invective in Wilson’s piece seems hyperbolic at best. True, Word’s intuitive features such as the (in)famous AutoCorrect and autoformat, that attempt to second-guess and interfere with the “pure” writing process, can be maddening. But they can readily be inactivated with a few moments’ attention. If this need is irksome. the Windows environment contains scaled-down, stripped back apps such as NotePad and WordPad, that surely satisfy the need for a more pure, text-based environment. Wilson’s protestation that the inclination to search for solutions on Google, inevitably leads the writer to the myriad distractions of the internet, seems to me more of a comment firstly on of the user’s inadequate training, and secondly, frustration with their own writing process. Word itself is a convenient, inanimate target for writers, tormented by the tyranny of the blank page, who, in a former age might have shattered their tablets on the ground, snapped their quills or consigned their parchment to the flames.
Thus, Wilson would do well to be wary of declaring “victory” in this way. Such a victory is likely to be Pyrrhic at best.