Word has outlasted its original functional spec and is now fighting to retain relevancy and usefulness in a much different world. WYSIWYG used to be hugely valu

Word has outlasted its original functional spec and is now fighting to retain relevancy and usefulness in a much different world. WYSIWYG used to be hugely valuable, making it easy to avoid wasteful reprints of work that didn't look right, or, worse, using an experiment/print/assess model to experimentally get markup right. But that problem has been solved for years, it's no longer interesting, and it's not how people use editors today. Today word docs are not used for print media, often they are the primary form of media transmission or are used for collaboration, uses to which word is almost uniquely poorly suited, but because word is there it's used. Word is horrible for collaboration because it's focused on appearance, not content. Editing in word fails the principle of least surprise and it's generally non-deterministic (you can't see the markup "under" your cursor that will take effect when you start typing or make other changes). Too much effort is spent fighting the tool rather than actually communicating or collaborating. This problem can't be fixed while maintaining word's compatibility with it's previous functionality so it's unlikely ms will fix it any time soon.