[TeMPOraL]

A hammer is pretty much an ancient technology. A battery-powered plastic toy hammer, with buttons that play melodies, is a modern take. Yet serious people use the (modern implementations of) ancient-style hammer to drive nails.

That's my general response to "why use 1970s tech?", though I guess I'm being a bit unfair here. Word is, in some ways, a marvelous piece of engineering. The whole Office suite is. Unfortunately, thanks to path dependence and business strategies, it's also locked in a place where it's not interoperable with anything outside the Office ecosystem by default.

I guess I have an answer to the age-old question: in sci-fi shows, how come nobody in-universe notices their computing technology is, in many areas, ridiculously inefficient and ineffective compared to the old XX/early-XXI-century tech? The answer may be, the sci-fi future tech is built on so many layers of lowest-common-denominator, walled garden, non-interoperable tech that people no longer know how interoperability or efficient computing looks like.

[oceanplexian]

I don't disagree a hammer is still a useful too, a lot like how a pencil and paper can still be a useful tool for architecting software, or when we need to sketch something out. However when it comes time to build a new construction, no, people are not out there hammering every individual nail. They're using nail guns and all manner of power tools to complete the job because it's more consistent and less time consuming.