Now inevitably associated with the Office suite and the Windows operating system, Microsoft Word has had another life, but one far from retirement.
As Windows Report reminds us, Microsoft Word was born on October 25, so it celebrated its birthday a few days ago, but not just any birthday, as the venerable tool blew out 40 candles: it was born in 1983. A pivotal year that saw the cinema release of Grandpa Does Resistance as well as Return of the Jedi, 1983 also saw the emergence of artists such as Madonna(Holiday), Cyndi Lauper(Girls just want to have fun), Bryan Adams(Straight from the heart), R.E.M. (Radio Free Europe), Paul Young(Wherever I lay my hat) and Frankie Goes to Hollywood(Relax), whose video was censored by MTV at the time.
On the computer front, 1983 saw the launch of Word software, albeit under a different name, Multi-Tool Word. The software was not yet running on Windows, not even on Microsoft DOS, but on the Xenix system. Development began on February 1, 1983, and the program was officially released on October 25 of the same year, when Microsoft decided to distribute it on the IBM PC and change its name to the one we all know today, Microsoft Word. The following month, Microsoft distributed demo versions of its software in PC World magazine. This was the first time that floppy disks were distributed with a magazine.
Microsoft Word went on to become one of the leading exponents of the WYSIWYG concept ( What You See Is What You Get). It was the first program to allow characters to be bolded or italicized, and quickly popularized the use of the mouse, which was still not widely used on IBM PCs. Microsoft Word subsequently joined the Windows family (almost ten years later) and, for the past twenty years, has been one of the key applications in the Microsoft Office suite, alongside Microsoft Excel in particular.
On the official Microsoft 365 blog, the publisher pays tribute to its illustrious software with a " Happy Birthday ", before looking ahead to the program's bright future. Microsoft intends to " ensure that Word evolves to help users perform all writing and reading tasks as efficiently as possible ". To achieve this, Microsoft and its teams have no shortage of ideas, starting with the integration of Copilot artificial intelligence, which looks set to become an integral part of all the Redmond group's tools.
Of course, there is also the question of continuing the transformation of Microsoft Word, and the Office suite as a whole, towards the Web. In addition, Microsoft is emphasizing the collaborative aspect of word processing, with tools to simplify and encourage the creation of shared content, with all the necessary precision and relevance of comments, as well as the exchange of ideas between document co-creators. Microsoft explains that it intends to ensure " that Word remains THE place to efficiently create, edit and annotate content no matter where you are, who you're working with or what device you're using ".
Microsoft also talks about providing "the tools and options to build incredible experiences and support for personalized workflows "... not necessarily very clear jargon, but even more surprisingly, the publisher stresses that Microsoft Word is " not just an authoring tool ", it's also " a remarkable place to read the documents that matter, regardless of device or location ". Even at 40 years of age, Microsoft Word still seems to have plenty of new things to come: it's never too late to reinvent yourself.
