My writing process has improved significantly —and my procrastination has decreased equally significantly — being able to work in tools that DO NOT expect me to write from start to finish and that do not expect me to format-as-I-go. I can’t believe how easy it has been to avoid procrastination and writer’s block by being able to pick up anywhere in the piece and to just start writing. Sometimes, I’ll just work on the sections that I can, sometimes working on those sections opens up the floodgates that allows me to complete the whole project or at least work on other sections that I felt blocked on.
And not wasting my time futzing with margins or fonts or font sizes or any other formatting challenge is quite freeing.
There are ways not to write top-to-bottom in Word, but the design works against you on that score.
In the early days, there were “competing products.” That was fun and enabled innovation. Then Microsoft Word and Excel mowed them all down. I perceive that the problem was that Microsoft developed a monopoly.
Why?
They were good products, but they also had good competitors. They were expensive products, but the key feature is that effectively Microsoft “tolerated” people stealing their software. Businesses had to pay so that gave them a big income stream. But individuals just used the products without paying.
If, as a developer, you were interested in competing with Microsoft it was hard to find an entry point. The businesses, with their enterprise software, were very reluctant to change and try anything new. Innovation is not what they are interested in. But if you tried to focus on the individual user, you ended up essentially competing with free. The individual users had access to Word / Excel without paying anything. So once Word / Excel became established, it was very hard for innovation to occur. I remember products that explored new ideas and had clever features. But they could not survive economically.
If there had been lots of lockdown features that made it really difficult to pirate Word / Excel then it would have been possible to compete on price in the market for individuals users. But that did not happen and the small developer word processor / spreadsheet world became a wasteland.
My viewpoint was that back in the MSDOS days WordPerfect was a better, perhaps superior product. But then two things happened:
Microsoft was promoting OS/2 as the MSDOS successor, so WordPerfect put their effort into an OS/2 port.
Internal to Microsoft they were working on Word for Windows.
So WordPerfect got a late start and, frankly, their first Windows version was garbage.
All I can say was WordPerfect handled a 600 page document I was working on with aplomb, while Word would choke trying to import it and just couldn’t handle figure placement in smaller documents. This was back in the 1990s. There has never been a year when Word has been my primary word processor, regardless of my surroundings. (Luckily no company ever mandated what I used as long as I could produce PDF results.
I was in the Mac world at the time, so did not see as much of WordPerfect although it was around.OS/2 ultimately ended up as a great bait and switch product. Competitors got sucked into a vortex while Microsoft had a quiet exit. IBM really got screwed. I guess this is why Bill ended up as the richest man in the world.
I’m 36. I do a lot of writing, and I’ve experimented with writing-related applications a lot. Before switching to Mac several years ago, I tried Word, Pandoc’s Markdown, and even Framemaker. Then I discovered Scrivener and loved its approach a lot. After Scrivener I discovered InDesign and loved its approach even more. Then I switched to Mac and discovered that Pages has page layout mode in which you can use it as InDesign, with some limitations, but also with some additional features, namely including audio and video recordings. Guess what I use currently? Keynote. Sure, I use Keynote for writing. I like it more than Pages because it supports Scrivener-like approach by nesting one slide into another, and this one to another one. I have also tried MadCap Flare and JetBrains Writerside. For LaTeX, try Texifier. I never tried Ulysses or iA Writer yet.
I strongly encourage everyone to read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. He mentions this as the actual meaning of the famous “media is the message” quotation.