Software That’s Good Enough That You Forget You’re Using It: No.5 Microsoft Word 2003

The best technology is transparent: so good you don’t think of it as technology at all. When technology reaches maturity it disappears into the fabric of our lives. In 2006, Microsoft Office Word for Windows had been around in various guises for over 20 years and had reached that level of maturity. Word was synomynous with word processors in the same way as “Hoover” was synomynous with vacuum cleaners, or “Martini” was synomynous with vermouth. And then Microsoft gave us Office Word for Windows 2007, a product that seems as transparent to me as a brick wall and only served to demonstrate that transparency can be removed as well as added in an upgrade.

Microsoft Office Word for Windows 2003 was the summation of twenty years of refinement of a word processing application. Some of the reasons for its transparency were simply products of its longevity and domination of the market. People knew what it looked like, and knew that if you sent a .doc file to a colleague they would be able to read. The menu structure although somewhat complicated was standardized across the Office range.

Transparency is often about the absence of barriers to the user. In the interests of progress, Word for Windows 2007 put a number of barriers in the way of users. First was the new file format. Defended as needed to make the file format an open standard, it ignores that fact there already was a widely recognized open document format (.odf) and that .doc had become a de facto standard. The impact was that it was no longer true that you could send a Word document and expect the recipient to be able to read it. Worse, Word 2007 refused to read my older Word documents which it regards as a security risk.

The second barrier for the user is the new improved ribbon interface. I still after over a year’s use cannot find all the functions I want to. Defenders say that once I have got used to it, it will seem more logical than its predecessor. How long? One year, two years? I remember smokers using the same argument to recruit non-smoking teenagers to their ranks.

This leaves me with a problem. Word 2003 is obsolete. So what are the transparent current word processors? In the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Kingsoft Office provides a modern interpretation of Word 2003, and Open Office 3 provides a slightly different interpretation. Best of all, if you still have Office Word for Windows 2003, my advice is hang onto it. It works just fine with Vista.

Microsoft Office Word for Windows 2003 is a word processor that’s transparent enough that the new version cannot compete on transparency. Fortunately, this has created the opportunity for other providers who can provide you with a transparent word processor.