[kaliszad]

Actually, Microsoft Office apps (others are not much better if at all) are not objectively easy to use for everyone. Just sit down a kid in the 2. or 3. grade and let them write about what they like with some structure, include pictures, print it out. You can go further: can they share a Word or Excel document on social media and will it generate a preview or do people have to download the whole document first and have some app that understands office documents installed? Ok, now sit them down in front of a brand new computer with Windows. How long will it take until they can edit a document in Microsoft Word, when they have to buy and install Office first?

Not very hard tasks to me - because I have done all of them hundreds of times. Other, even more advanced tools by Microsoft of course would fare much worse even with people like you and me, otherwise quite proficient with digital tools, if we haven't learned to use the one tool beforehand.

Yeah, Word is better than Notepad if what you want is to write rich text, but is it actually much better than WordPad from the usability perspective?

You have other problems, when your environment is so unstable that you have to hire new people every 6 months. Nowadays, you cannot expect any knowledge really unless the people can show a certification. Even a diploma in CS from a university doesn't mean the people know how to program useful stuff.

[mlac]

I’m not saying they are easy to use, but they are the standard. I’m also not saying I like that they are the standards, but everyone with 3+ years experience at a large company out of college can use Word to edit text in a document. Or should be expected to.

A new trainee every six months for a sales or marketing department isn’t crazy - it could be growing or a team of 6 people rotating out every ~3 years. I’ve bounced between WYSIWG and plain text, but there is a hard and steep learning curve when you ask people to use plain text.

Word also has spell-check and other features we take for granted.