I found much to appreciate in this article, but also an apparent contradiction or at least a tension.
3.3.1 Office at school, school as an office
Why are we sending our kids to a school that looks like a Microsoft ad? To prepare them for the future. Does equipping children with Office tools truly serve this purpose or does it serve the purpose of cementing a life in the products of a software monopolist?
To learn how to read, write, think, and speak, we don’t need Office or any other apps. We need to actually do those things—read, write, think, and speak. To that end, pen and paper do a better job than screens.
Kids are spending more than enough time in front of screens. The argument, that this prepares them for their future is involuntarily cynical. One month at work is enough to learn Office. We don’t need to teach PowerPoint to kindergarteners.
But iA Writer depends on a screen. Markdown may help us write better, but based on the logic of the argument above, we would not permit students to use iA Writer. We’d give them a legal pad and pen.
I would genuinely appreciate it if those who take approximately seven minutes to read the article would share their thoughts.
Being a fan of neither Microsoft Office nor Markdown, I didn’t particularly find this enlightening. Just about everything I run uses RTF. I used WordPerfect until the early 2000’s and never felt Word was particularly good considering its bulk.
The classroom will always end up using whatever they can get cheap. Office suites are going to be far overkill for grade school but the kids will survive. And WYSIWYG is certainly a better place to start than cryptic codes (like Markdown).
Of course being above a certain age I went to school without any computing device for writing, spreadsheets or presentations. I did have a typewriter, a slide rule, protractor, … And our kids had early computer programs at home (not at school when they started). A TRS-80 with Scripsit and a dot matrix printer, followed by Wordstar under CP/M. Probably easier today with MS Word.
Microsoft formats probably became the standard because MS produced a bundle of programs for businesses when many of those businesses were still using green screen terminals.
Later, if memory serves, the Office Open XML came about because governments, etc. that used Microsoft software didn’t want their data tied up in a proprietary format. I seem to recall an early version of it might have been in StarOffice, from Sun Microsystems.
Commercial formats have lasted this long because businesses around the world depend on them. I’ve never been asked if I can open a Word document. If you are in business it is assumed that you know what businesses use. Vendors, etc. just send you a Word or Excel document without a second thought.
“School is still completely dominated by old fashioned formats?” I thought 150 million students used Google Workspace these days? IMO, much of the software people use these days is close enough in the way it works, that it really doesn’t matter what you trained on first.
I watched adults that had never used a PC in their life learn Lotus 1-2-3 v1a, then switch to Excel with no training. Sure there was a fair amount of “how do I do . . .” but they learned.
Regardless of how successful markdown may become I don’t see it replacing MS formats. Businesses use Microsoft, or to a lesser extent, Google Workspace.
This article reminds me of the rants about desktop Linux that used to surface from time to time.
I found the article’s points not strictly wrong but also not all that compelling.
Two points of clarification though:
I agree, but I think this is more about their ethos than their product (they even make a notebook haha! Notebook – iA )
Though originally when I read through your post, I thought this was an argument about markdown needing a screen so I’m going to argue why that’s not the case
Yes, to actually see the formatting you’d need a screen to render markdown. But, one could on pen and paper write **exciting** and learn, the same way as we learned in school about the different shorthands for editing (the loop for crossing out a word, the ❡ symbol for move to a new line) that it means something even though one can’t change it. And when one transitions to a computer, if one goes directly to a markdown editor, it would seamlessly become “formatted.” Whereas, for Word you’d need something akin to
Today was very [For Word < 2009 Formatting > Bold, For Word > 2009 < Bold]exciting[For Word < 2009 Formatting > Bold, For Word > 2009 < Bold]
The second thing was I have a completely different (and unfounded) hypothesis about why LLMs use markdown and it has everything to do with how they’re trained.
LLMs are trained on the internet
Markdown is a simplified form of HTML
Developers love Markdown
If this is true, it would make sense then that all the data in and out at inference time (when you chat) would be best formatted in markdown.
People will use either what they’re told to, or what they know and, in my experience, zero training will be given.
I also dislike Markdown, but I think Word is the single most-misused piece of software in the history of computing. It deserves to be destroyed in a raging inferno.
It’s an interesting article but I think it is misleading in a number of ways
The reason for the shift to Markdown is not because the world suddenly became averse to Word formatting - rather, Markdown coincided with the evolution of the web.
Microsoft did not become the leader in their industry by scamming their customers into adopting a locked-in format. There was very robust competition in the word processing world starting with Electric Pencil and Wordstar in the 1980s. What Microsoft got right was WYSIWYG. That’s not a bug; that’s a feature.
Prior to WYSIWYG we had to use very expensive desktop publishing software - such as Ventura Publisher - in order to produce professional grade formatting. Microsoft combined those, saved businesses tons of money in the process, and offered to individuals a level of finished product previously unattainable without physically going to a print shop
All this talk about formatting taking away from the thought process of writing is total BS. For two reasons - (a) For many people, the design is part of the message - thus it is all done simultaneously in Word; (b) For those who prefer focusing solely on text initially, nobody is forcing you to use any of the formatting features. Alternatively, you are welcome to write your first-draft in TextEdit or BBEdit or whatever barebones text editor you wish and then import it to Word
The fundamental reason why Markdown is preferred on the web whereas Word is used for printed text is simple - Word is page oriented, whereas Markdown is page agnostic. For that very reason, I prefer Word for documents which I need to produce in paper or as a PDF, whereas I used Markdown for text I will either post online or read locally in my computer (i.e. long summary reports created by DT4 AI).
For all the supposed “simplicity” advantages of Markdown, it actually fails in one key respect - sharing documents. This happens for two reasons (a) Markdown is still not very well known outside of the power-user community. When I am asked to produce my file in a legal case for example and it includes Markdown documents, very often I am asked what that file is and how can the other party read it; (b) The lack of formatting in Markdown is as much a downside as an upside. Even if I share Markdown with a colleague or friend who knows what it is, that collleague will see a very different document unless I also share a style sheet or embed CSS or some other technical trick. It is much simpler to share a .docx or .pdf document where I have confidence that all readers will see the same thing.
Thus Word rightfully earned its place as the de facto standard for sharing documents in the business, legal, publishing, and academic worlds. Markdown has not replaced that and likely will not replace it; rather, Markdown may become king for web-centric writing, an area where Word has never competed.
11 years ago I bought iA Writer simply because Microsoft Word is page oriented which is for printing or pdf, and of course I don’t like on Word I always needed to choose the font and kept saving in case of app crash which led to data loss. But definitely not because of Markdown.
Now there are more and more apps which do not have Markdowns have simple interfaces. Apple Notes, UpNotes, Notions, Craft… and I don’t see any Markdown apps without formatting tool bar.
Not to mention one of the Word alternatives: Pages, which doesn’t have so many buttons on the toolbars and users can customise them to add/remove buttons.
I can choose to write everything first, and add some headings or formats later especially when proofreading, instead of adding them when writing. Photos are the same cases so I can choose to add before (for reference during writing) or after.
Years ago, Fraser Speirs had a great podcast (Canvas) with Federico Viticci. I remember once Fraser mentioning how the private school where he worked was using Pages, Numbers etc. and someone saying they should use MS Office so the pupils would be ready for the business world. He replied “I told them we’re teaching the children to be executives, not secretaries.” That’s from my memory, not an exact quote, and I didn’t take it as a diss on secretaries. (He guested on a number of other podcasts, so he might have actually said this on Mac PowerUsers or some other podcast I listened to).
One of the bonuses of Canvas was the ping-pong between Federico’s Italian and Fraser’s Scottish accents. A hoot if you enjoy languages!
Let’s call it stable! AFAIK, RTF is the format used for all copy/paste operations that maintain formatting. I write primarily in Scrivener, except for coding (BBEdit or Arduino IDE) and short form (Notes, Pages, …).
I agree with nearly every word of this. I used and loved WordPerfect 5.1. When Word for Windows for Windows 2.0 came out, WordPerfect was doomed. I still miss the reveal codes, but Word’s integration among its office suite, the start of ODBC data sharing, and the WYSIWYG power of Word quickly made it rise to the spot of king. I have written before about how MS Word contributed greatly to my developing/becoming a writer: See, e.g.,
I wrote in that post how I’ve come to dislike Word, but that is such a nuanced dislike. As a lawyer, I use it virtually every day. I have been irritated with Microsoft for not pushing the iPad version more and for not fixing a bug that has ruined a number of my documents. I cancelled my office subscription in protest, and then gave up and re-subscribed a month or so later. That probably offers two key insights into why I some dislike for Word. I don’t like that I seemingly have to use it because the tool is the standard in my world. I’d prefer to be able to have documents that are tool agnostic, but that is not my world. Additionally, I don’t like that Microsoft has bloated Word and made it less enjoyable to use as a writing tool in some respects. The advent of the ribbon has done more to slow my work down then any UI element in modern computing. Okay, that might be a stretch.
But Word works, works well, and enables lots of diverse uses, users, and workflows. In terms of reliability, in the old days, corrupt documents were common. It’s different, vastly different today. Other than this absurd iPad problem I’ve had saving Word files in certain locations (e.g., iCloud), I don’t think I’ve had a document corrupted to the point of data loss in Word in probably a decade. I have had formatting corruptions which sometimes require nuke and pave—a problem Wordperfect’s reveal codes almost never struggled with. But the nuke and pave problem may slow me down, but I haven’t fundamentally lost any data.
Here is the only place I really depart from your take, and only in part.
I have wasted tons of time playing with MS Word formatting when I should be focusing on editing my sentences. I know others who struggle with that. Design of documents is important, I agree with that. But I don’t think clients’ should pay for lawyers to be changing margins and font choices. The problem is not that best feature of Word—WYSIWYG—is also its greatest curse. The ability to play with formatting and design become an almost irresistible urge to design rather than write. That may not be a problem for everybody, but it is for me.
To solve that problem, I’ve written entire documents in emails for my assistant or the word processing team to put into Word. I’ve written entire documents in Apple Notes, too, before sending them to Word. My favorite non-Word place to work on complex documents is Scrivener, of course. But even Scrivener eventually filters down to Word. I still dictate, and am working on doing more of that thank you to the combination of AI translation features for audio recordings, the action button on my iPhone, and having a voice memos complication on my watch. But I digress.
I also agree that some of the problem with Word is not Word but lack of training and misusing it. I think I posted somewhere here before that when i first started working, we used Word for every kind of computing task you could imagine: Database, spreadsheet, to do lists, photo collage, scratch notes, and more. Word was the Swiss army knife.
The fact is that Word is substantially more powerful and useful than Markdown is for the business world and everyone who is not power user, or web-centric writer. And people like to format their documents.
I myself tried the plain text experiment for a while: emails; notes to self; reading notes; to do lists; etc. It’s great! It’s fast! It’s totally searchable in the file system. Sure, maybe. But it looks horrible (using a bunch of asterisks to imitate bolding, for example); it’s annoying to read; it obscures important content; and it decreases overall comprehension. There is a reason we all stopped using the Pine e-mail client.
I agree, Word has earned pride of place. Overall, I think it earned it on the merits. Word would have never become what it is today, if people truly hated using it or vastly preferred something else.
I still dictate, and am working on doing more of that thank you to the combination of AI translation features for audio recordings, the action button on my iPhone, and having a voice memos complication on my watch. But I digress.