 |
| The Altair 8800 kit (source) |
Microsoft Word is one component of Microsoft 365, which generates billions of dollars of revenue each year. Why introduce free Word Online? My guess is that AI agents will use Word Online to format documents for users.
My first professional job was at IBM, where I keypunched programs and handed the card decks to an operator who added my program to a queue waiting to be run on a mainframe computer -- batch processing. Some years later, I typed a short Fortran program at an experimental Quicktran terminal at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. Time-sharing was an obvious game-changing paradigm shift.
The next one came when I picked up a copy of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine at the Savon Drug Store in Venice, California, and read about the MITS Altair 8800 computer kit. Another game changer -- I could now own my own tools, and I became a self-employed consultant a few years later. My next epiphany came at an Interop Conference in San Francisco when I typed a DIR command into a computer in Texas, and the output displayed as fast as if it were on my desktop. The Internet was revolutionary.
Is Microsoft Word for the Web a game changer like time-sharing, personal computers, and the Internet? I don't know, but it's not just a free, stripped-down version of Microsoft Word. When will we see Excel for the Web?