Ars Technica had a nice opinion essay posted today called, "The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world." In case you didn't catch it, the actual page name for the link is, "microsoft-word-1983---2008-rest-in-peace.ars". Clearly, they're predicting the death of Word as a major force.
And it isn't OpenOffice that's doing it, it's the cloud. Google Docs. MediaWiki. Anything with a RichEditor text interface. And for those things that just aren't usable in those interfaces, there are specialized tools that do that job better than Word does.
The second page of the essay goes into some detail about how the author was able to replace an old school file-server with a MediaWiki. MediaWiki, it seems, is an excellent document-management product. Most people already know how to use it (thank you Wikipedia), anything entered is indexed with the built in search tools, and there is integrated change-tracking. Contrast this with a standard File Server, where indexing is a recent add-on if it exists at all, change tracking is done at the application level if at all, and files just get lost and forgotten. MediaWiki just does it better.
I never expected, "MediaWiki is the Word killer," to be made as an argument, but there are some good points in there. I do very little editing in any word processor at work. I do much more spreadsheet work, as that's still a pretty solid data manipulation interface. Tech Services has a Wiki now, and we're slooooly increasing usage of it.
And yet, there are still some areas of my life where I still use a stand-alone word processor. If I really, truly need better type-setting than can be provided by javascript and CCS driven HTML, a stand-alone is the only way to go. If I'm actually going to print something off, perhaps because I have to fax it, I'm more likely to use a word processor. There are some cultural areas where solidly type-set documentation is still a must; wedding invitations, birth announcements, resumes, cover letters. And even these are going ever more electronic.
The last time I seriously job-searched (back in 2003) I spent hours polishing the formatting of my resume. Tweaking margins so the text would flow cleanly from one page to the next. Picking a distinctive yet readable font. Fine tuning the spacing to help fit the text better. Inserting subtle graphic elements line horizontal lines. Inserting small graphics, such as my CNE logo. In the end I had a fine looking document! I even emailed it to HR when I applied. The cover letter got much the same treatment, but less focus on detailed formatting.
If I were to start looking today, it is vastly more likely that I'd attach the document (a PDF by preference, to preserve formatting, but DOC is still doable) to an online job application submission system of some kind. Or worse yet, be presented a size-limited ASCII text-entry field I'd have to cut-and-paste my resume into. The same would go for the cover letter. One of these two still encourages finely tuned type-setting like I did in 2003. The other explicitly strips everything but line feeds out.
Even six years ago there was no actual paper involved.
So I'll close with this. If you need typesetting, which is distinct from text formatting, then you still need offline tools for processing words. This is because you're doing more than simple word processing, you're also processing the format of it all. But if all you're doing is bolding, highlighting, changing text sizes, and creating the odd table, then the online tools as they exist now are well and truly all you need. It has been a SysAdmin addage for years that most people could use WordPad instead of Word for most of what they do, and these days everything WordPad can do is now in your browser.
And it isn't OpenOffice that's doing it, it's the cloud. Google Docs. MediaWiki. Anything with a RichEditor text interface. And for those things that just aren't usable in those interfaces, there are specialized tools that do that job better than Word does.
The second page of the essay goes into some detail about how the author was able to replace an old school file-server with a MediaWiki. MediaWiki, it seems, is an excellent document-management product. Most people already know how to use it (thank you Wikipedia), anything entered is indexed with the built in search tools, and there is integrated change-tracking. Contrast this with a standard File Server, where indexing is a recent add-on if it exists at all, change tracking is done at the application level if at all, and files just get lost and forgotten. MediaWiki just does it better.
I never expected, "MediaWiki is the Word killer," to be made as an argument, but there are some good points in there. I do very little editing in any word processor at work. I do much more spreadsheet work, as that's still a pretty solid data manipulation interface. Tech Services has a Wiki now, and we're slooooly increasing usage of it.
And yet, there are still some areas of my life where I still use a stand-alone word processor. If I really, truly need better type-setting than can be provided by javascript and CCS driven HTML, a stand-alone is the only way to go. If I'm actually going to print something off, perhaps because I have to fax it, I'm more likely to use a word processor. There are some cultural areas where solidly type-set documentation is still a must; wedding invitations, birth announcements, resumes, cover letters. And even these are going ever more electronic.
The last time I seriously job-searched (back in 2003) I spent hours polishing the formatting of my resume. Tweaking margins so the text would flow cleanly from one page to the next. Picking a distinctive yet readable font. Fine tuning the spacing to help fit the text better. Inserting subtle graphic elements line horizontal lines. Inserting small graphics, such as my CNE logo. In the end I had a fine looking document! I even emailed it to HR when I applied. The cover letter got much the same treatment, but less focus on detailed formatting.
If I were to start looking today, it is vastly more likely that I'd attach the document (a PDF by preference, to preserve formatting, but DOC is still doable) to an online job application submission system of some kind. Or worse yet, be presented a size-limited ASCII text-entry field I'd have to cut-and-paste my resume into. The same would go for the cover letter. One of these two still encourages finely tuned type-setting like I did in 2003. The other explicitly strips everything but line feeds out.
Even six years ago there was no actual paper involved.
So I'll close with this. If you need typesetting, which is distinct from text formatting, then you still need offline tools for processing words. This is because you're doing more than simple word processing, you're also processing the format of it all. But if all you're doing is bolding, highlighting, changing text sizes, and creating the odd table, then the online tools as they exist now are well and truly all you need. It has been a SysAdmin addage for years that most people could use WordPad instead of Word for most of what they do, and these days everything WordPad can do is now in your browser.