It's kinda silly to say that new word processors have nothing on their predecessors. After all, Microsoft and Corel and Apple do have to convince people to buy the new product. And they do have to convince people, since Office is rather expensive.
I think that it is fair to say that most new word processors have few new features that many people will use. The few new features that will see heavy use will be things that the user has no choice in, like the user interface cleanup of Office 2007 or the Intel code of the latest Mac version. Or worst, people will be roped into upgrading for interoperability: the reason why people use Word over WordPerfect is much the same reason why people will end up using Word 2007 over Word 2003. Of course there will be specialist features that some people will use a lot. For example: I would imagine that the new equation editor is better than the stripped down version of MathType that Microsoft shipped with Word in the past (how can it be worse). There will also be a bunch of features that people will use once or twice, either for genuine labour saving or just to justify their purchase of the upgrade.
Over all though, I'm left wondering: why can't we have different products targetted at different needs. A student doesn't need mail-merge, unless there is a major case of plagiarism going on; a novelist is unlikely to embed images; a secretary doesn't have time to play around with word art or borders; a child would probably be confused by by VBScripting (that, or program the most successful macro virus ever).
Meanwhile these "you have to own this end all and be all product because someone is going to send you a Word or Excel attachment that won't work properly in a competitor's product" products suck for some users. The last version of Office I used (2003) was more painful to use than LaTeX+awk+gnuplot (masochistic Unix applications) for scientific applications. Researchers are still stuck buying a third party bibliographic manager to compliment a product that includes the kitchen sink, but apparently lacks some fundamental writing tools. And screen-writing software seem to be a popular category, so I suppose Word fails there too.
So why can't people give up on bloatware and just get specialized and lean applications. (After all, consumers are a large part of the drive in the market.) That way you can save all of that RAM and all of those CPU cycles for the important things in life. Like watching YouTube (or, in my case, Annenberg videos).
I think that it is fair to say that most new word processors have few new features that many people will use. The few new features that will see heavy use will be things that the user has no choice in, like the user interface cleanup of Office 2007 or the Intel code of the latest Mac version. Or worst, people will be roped into upgrading for interoperability: the reason why people use Word over WordPerfect is much the same reason why people will end up using Word 2007 over Word 2003. Of course there will be specialist features that some people will use a lot. For example: I would imagine that the new equation editor is better than the stripped down version of MathType that Microsoft shipped with Word in the past (how can it be worse). There will also be a bunch of features that people will use once or twice, either for genuine labour saving or just to justify their purchase of the upgrade.
Over all though, I'm left wondering: why can't we have different products targetted at different needs. A student doesn't need mail-merge, unless there is a major case of plagiarism going on; a novelist is unlikely to embed images; a secretary doesn't have time to play around with word art or borders; a child would probably be confused by by VBScripting (that, or program the most successful macro virus ever).
Meanwhile these "you have to own this end all and be all product because someone is going to send you a Word or Excel attachment that won't work properly in a competitor's product" products suck for some users. The last version of Office I used (2003) was more painful to use than LaTeX+awk+gnuplot (masochistic Unix applications) for scientific applications. Researchers are still stuck buying a third party bibliographic manager to compliment a product that includes the kitchen sink, but apparently lacks some fundamental writing tools. And screen-writing software seem to be a popular category, so I suppose Word fails there too.
So why can't people give up on bloatware and just get specialized and lean applications. (After all, consumers are a large part of the drive in the market.) That way you can save all of that RAM and all of those CPU cycles for the important things in life. Like watching YouTube (or, in my case, Annenberg videos).