[finnp]

And as everyone knows the word count tool initiated the downfall of microsoft word empire. Seriously, I don't think it was a bad decision to kill the reader. Not a nice one, but I think certainly not one where Google is going to learn a lesson about.

[Mindless2112]

That wasn't quite the point -- it was that the influencers cared about the word-count tool. (You might also notice that Word currently has a word-count tool.)

[danielweber]

I think his story got mangled in a game of telephone. Microsoft loves their word count. Competitors got bit by it, though:

This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.

From former Microsoft employee Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html He has links to reviews in the original

There are stories, though, of Microsoft shipping out beta copies of Microsoft Word with debugging all turned on, which made it slow, and despite saying so very carefully to all reviewers who got a copy, they still got torn apart for it being slow. I think the story is in "Coding The Microsoft Way" which I haven't seen in over a decade.