From this point onwards I utterly refuse to you Microsoft Word. I’ve known there are alternatives available for a long time and yet I’ve persisted with it. A lot of this is down to simple laziness. The hegemony of MS Office means that for many PC users, it’s the default option. Either it comes packaged with their PC or, as in many case, its part of the default installation on the network they work on. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that Word is a piece of software equipped with a huge degree of functionality. In fact this is the problem. Given the communicative possibilities opened up by the internet and modern cable connections, why do we persist with software packaged for as broad a market as possible? What percentage of Word users actually understand, let alone utilise, the seemingly quite excessive functionality the software is equipped with?

In a way there’s a parallel here to game consoles. Sony put their focus into progressively improving the technical capacity of their consoles as an end in itself whereas Nintendo (quite rightly) put their emphasis on usability, satisfaction and enjoyment. The latter approach doesn’t preclude technological innovation but it conceives of them as a means to an end. Surely the way things should be? There’s a business model implied in the Sony/Microsoft approach which is increasingly anachronistic; blindly expanding functionality with each progressive version as a means of ensuring planned obsolescence. If you pack enough new features into each new version, it (a) has a broad appeal to your entire userbase (b) it underscores the qualitative superiority of the new version over the old. However it also leads to the cumbersome piece of shit that is MS Word which crashes repeatedly and destorys my formatting when I try and add margins to my dissertation writeup (thus prompting the disjointed rant you’re currently reading, as well as a frenzied two hours of formatting to get it done prior to the deadline).