Though to be honest Word is likely to be around forever as well - insofar as "forever" means current computing equipment. In a world where you can't open a Word

Though to be honest Word is likely to be around forever as well - insofar as "forever" means current computing equipment. In a world where you can't open a Word document is probably a world where we aren't able to read plain text documents either. After all, Word documents are "just" a series of compressed xml files. Even the open source alternatives will allow you to recover text in the event you lose access to Microsoft products.