"Microsoft Word Must Die"

I never had much of a problem with Word, although Word 95 is the most recent version I actually enjoyed. You weren’t putting your text into what felt and acted like an overburdened browser window, and you could still switch off all the annoyances. If I remember correctly, it was pretty much just a 32-bit recompile of the previous version for Windows 3.1. Later versions made me sometimes want to tear my hair out. But I tore out Steve Ballmer’s instead.

Anyway, and more seriously, Word is worse than I ever thought:

Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates to write applications for the new Macintosh system in 1984, and Bill agreed. One of his first jobs was to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer — Microsoft Word for Macintosh. Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they’re fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.

From there, things got really ugly.