Microsoft Word Gets Legal

This ubiquitous word processing program began its life as "Bravo," the first WYSIWYG document preparation program that was brought to Microsoft in 1981 by Charles Simonyi, who is regarded by many as the father of Word, from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

Microsoft's official Word development team was given the green light in 1982, and the first version featuring WYSIWYG was released in 1983, but the application was not officially released as Word for Windows until 1989, which is the date Microsoft regards as its birthday.

Along the way, Word has garnered more than 90 percent share of the word processing market, avoided becoming embroiled in any antitrust actions, either in the United States or European Union, and become an integral part of Microsoft's suite of Office products, which are used by more than 450 million people around the world.

But, in a move to appease the European Commission and ensure that Vista could ship in Europe at the same time as elsewhere in the world, Microsoft agreed in October 2006 to submit a new fixed-layout document format, the XML Paper Specification, to a standards-setting organization.

It further agreed to revise the licensing terms on which the specification is made available to other software developers, while also trying to make the licensing terms for the XML Paper specification consistent with those for the Open Office XML format.

Redmond is also highlighting the fact that Word turns 18 this year as part of a campaign to drive interest in -- and adoption of -- Office 2007 and Windows Vista, which will be released to consumers and small businesses at the end of this month.

But Word faces growing competition from products like Corel's WordPerfect, Sun's branded StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice.org distribution, to name a few.

Microsoft corporate vice president Peter Pathe, who has pretty much been parenting Word since he joined the software giant in 1991 to manage the development of the TrueType font system, maintains that over time, ease-of-use became as important, even more important in some cases, than any particular word processing feature.

But contrast that statement with some interesting numbers the spokeswoman shared with me: Microsoft has kept the same functionality in Word 2007 as is in Word 2003, where there are more than 31 toolbars featuring some 1,500 commands.

In Word 2007 these are located in the new ribbon user interface rather than in the traditional "menu command" form found in Word 2003 and before, with 80 percent of the commands people most use now located in the first tab within the ribbon, she told me.

That compares with the two toolbars and fewer than 50 menu commands found in Word for Windows when it was introduced 18 years ago, and the 31 toolbars with 1,500 commands found in Word 2003.

So, has Redmond managed to effectively maintain ease-of-use with Word and Office as it added functionality, or is that goal nothing more than hot air?