| My theory is that the answer lies along a different axis than the other commenters. I think Word is a consequence of the the fact that modern office work is optimized to extract the maximum short-term resources out of people, or at least put up the appearance of doing so. Consider someone dealing with inter-departmental collaboration on documents at a company in the 70s or 80s. They could potentially invent their own system, make paper copies mandatory, go full computer, or any number of solutions in between. Technology was considered hard and looked recognizably so, and management was less likely to question technical views and opinions about this. People were way less likely to get fired and generally visualized staying there for a while, so they were comfortable sticking to their viewpoints. Today, your boss and their boss are all concerned with how to get the maximum amount of work out of you in the time you're at the company. So if you propose retraining everyone on Open Office or Markdown, because it has high potential for a better way of tracking changes or something, you'll get pushback from a) management, because the CEO is going to say “but I use Word all the time, why can't you just use that?” and b) the workers, because they know they will be forced to learn it on their own time rather than being given a proper amount of time to train and learn. [1] I think modern society and modern work are slowly defaulting to the idea of quickly throwing in the towel and just using whatever technology is approved by the milieu. This is true even in our industry, consider this article [2] by Latacora [3] for instance: it's full of statements which approximately say “Just use CloudTrail”, “Just Use Jamf”, “Just Use Okta SSO” etc. If our industry is doing things like this to optimize extraction (even the article acknowledges that SOC2 is purely documentation optimized for selling to big companies), why would we be so surprised that publishing departments and such are optimized to Just Use Microsoft Word rather than a technically better system? ------- [1] Think back: when was the last time you had a proper training about how to use a certain piece of software by people from the company building it, or at least certified trainers? These were way more common back in the day. [2] https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html [3] A very respectable security company focused on startups. |