| "Word Documents": Now there's a blast from the past. In my last 3 decades, I've used a UNIX-style operating system as my day-to-day operating system. It used to be that my ever-present problem was in dealing with Word Documents. Practically every document I received back then was a Word Document. They were ubiquitous. If you couldn't read a Word Document you couldn't do business. I used WABI on Solaris to run Word itself in the 90s. It wasn't always workable. So a lot of the time I was dual-booting to Windows and running the true Office. In the Noughties, I was able to stay in my UNIX-like system and run Star Office followed by Libre Office to read the fairly common Word Documents that came my way. But now, in the early Twenties, I only just realised that over the course of the 2010s, all of those Word Documents just dried up and blew away. These days, I might receive perhaps one to two .docx files a year, and Libre Office handles them without me having to think about it. But I think the biggest killer of Word Documents has been Microsoft itself. By trying to stay proprietary and keep the free Office suites continually playing catch-up Microsoft kept extending and extending Word's features. If you didn't have the latest (expensive) Microsoft Office, you couldn't read the latest Word Documents. People got sick of this and the world gradually moved, over the course of the decade or so, to sending and receiving .PDFs. Adobe were smarter than Microsoft. They realised that a .PDF could be available to all, no matter what operating system one used, and everybody could use it. That being the case, everybody DID use it. |