This development aligns with Microsoft’s ongoing initiative to streamline its software offerings and concentrate on more sophisticated applications.
Gross corpospeak. Translated as “We never invested in this because we want you to buy the paid version. Now that the paid version has completely eclipsed the free version we will be deprecating it”
They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don’t think anyone is saying that windows is not “within their rights”, they’re saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.
Honestly though I’m struggling to understand why you’d think that’s about Microsoft’s rights to begin with??
The specific complaint was “gross corpospeak”. Let’s go ahead and use your explanation of the situation instead of mine, as it is indeed more accurate: how would you disseminate this change to your customers in a way that’s not “gross corpospeak”?
I can’t speak for the original commented, but I’m personally quite tired of the thin veneer that’s slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.
For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I’m also annoyed that MS isn’t being straightforward about it.
But if it’s not being developed (that’s my assumption as I haven’t touched WordPad in many, many years) and not many people are using it (again, I’m assuming based on my own personal experiences and those in the workplace), what’s wrong with removing a legacy system?
People complain all the time about Microsoft retaining legacy systems, often seemingly detrimentally, so here it is, an opportunity to remove a legacy system, but now it’s bad?
I get that not everyone has Word. But Word isn’t as paywalled as it once was. There’s the web version of Word, that’s free to use with a free Microsoft account. There’s Google Docs, also free with a gmail account. And there’s of course OpenOffice and LibreOffice, obviously free. So users have options for word processing that are better than WordPad.
I mean, I think they literally provided the preferred, truthful version of the statement?
“We never invested in this because we want you to buy the paid version. Now that the paid version has completely eclipsed the free version we will be deprecating it”
This definitely sucks for the average, non-technical user. We can all use Sublime3 or Notepad++ or whatever other replacement tool we prefer, but the average user has no clue about those and will be tricked into thinking that paid-for Word is the only real easy and good option.
This is Wordpad, not Notepad. There is still a perfectly functional plain text editor(until they decide to slam ads into it) for Windows. WordPad was a rich text editor. Sublime and Notepad++ don’t really compete with that. LibreOffice and OnlyOffice exist for free in that space, but you are right that non-tech savvy users will struggle to find them on Windows.
True, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are more direct replacements for a word-like interface. I use markdown for all my rich text editing needs, so in my mind Sublime3 and Notepad++ are the only replacement editors I think of (both support live markdown display with a plugin).
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