Stross is not wrong. But he does miss a few reasons for disliking "Word".
1. At heart, "Word" wants to create paper-printable output. But it doesn't show you "what you get", but rather a loose approximation. Without a lot of effort, a book typeset with "Word" is clearly distinguishable. Promising "WYSIWYG" and not delivering on the "WYG" is pretty damning.
2. The basic user interface is for beginning computer users in 1985, say. It was designed for people who knew how to type using a typewriter. It has not gotten better, or different, despite all of us ditching our typewriters decades ago. There's no way to progress in the "Word" user interface. We're all stuck using a typewriter imitator.
Are there any alternatives for which these criticisms don’t apply? I use both MS Office and Libre Office and your point applies to both.
I guess almost four decades of the same UI paradigm for such an incredibly widely used software category makes it difficult to conceive of new paradigms.
LibreOffice is an example of Stross' criticism that every "word processor" is a pale imitation of "Word", because of "Word's" status as the Standard Business Word Processor. Personally, I kept my resume in troff input format for a long time, because I thought the result looked pretty good on paper. I have never purchased "Word" for myself, only suing it at the office. I may not be a fount of knowledge in this area.
1. At heart, "Word" wants to create paper-printable output. But it doesn't show you "what you get", but rather a loose approximation. Without a lot of effort, a book typeset with "Word" is clearly distinguishable. Promising "WYSIWYG" and not delivering on the "WYG" is pretty damning.
2. The basic user interface is for beginning computer users in 1985, say. It was designed for people who knew how to type using a typewriter. It has not gotten better, or different, despite all of us ditching our typewriters decades ago. There's no way to progress in the "Word" user interface. We're all stuck using a typewriter imitator.