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Jeremy Reimer writes an excellent article for ArsTechnica on the demise of Microsoft Word and the whole idea of a "word processor" that is designed to format text to be printed out on (gasp!) paper and handed about:

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world

In the longish article (and yes, it is worth every word), Jeremy shows us why Word is an anachronism, why any number of other applications — and principally the Web, content-management systems and wikis (such as MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia) have pretty much made the traditional word-processed document not just obsolete but also a pain in the ass.

Just read it already.

The image above right is a clay tablet found at Ebla, Syria. It dates from about 2250 BC. Nice, isn't it? One thing you can say about clay — it can last a long time (if you don't crack it in half ... or worse).

So I'm working on a not-so-complicated (but not plain text) document that began its life some time ago in Microsoft Word, which means it's a .doc file that got uploaded to Google Docs.

It sort of, kind of looked OK in Google Docs, except that in a few places I couldn't get the fonts and the margins right.

And outputting the Google Docs document back into .doc or .odt (OpenDocument) was a real mess, with a mix of Web styles, Word styles, strange margins, etc.

After getting nowhere fast in Google Docs, I finally tried to remove all formatting and start over. But I couldn't even get the line spacing right.

I'm sure a little CSS hackery could have made things right, but I'm not in any mode to do that.

So I exported the document in .odt format and worked on it in OpenOffice Writer. Now I can save it as an HTML, MS Word or RTF document, or better yet export it as a PDF.

I love having Google Docs enable me to work on things anywhere, at any time, but I've found that the cloud-based app works best when documents originate in Google Docs and stay there. Converting them to .odt, RTF and .doc format causes the formatting to break down.

I've blogged in the past about how poorly Google Docs offline with Gears worked for me.

So at this point, what would work better for my situation would be cloud-based files accessed by apps on my local client.

And I'd like to see the ability to access networked files in the cloud be available from every application, meaning the feature would be integrated in the operating system or desktop environment and not be part of a single application.

Just a thought. I'll feel better about Google Docs later this week when I get back to what I mostly use it for. I'm dropping code and documentation into it all the time and sharing those files with my co-workers. That's one thing that Google Docs does better than anything else I've seen.

And I will try to create a heavily formatted document in Docs. I just wish it could be the SAME document shared between Docs and OpenOffice. Maybe a Docs-formatted document would play more nicely in OO than a Word-formatted document turned into a Docs document, then an OO document.

Hey teeming masses, don't say Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates (and the Professor and Mary-Ann) never did nothing for you.

In a totally roundabout way, I learned that Microsoft is giving away — I say giving away — Microsoft Word. OK ... Microsoft Word for DOS. Remember that? I do. I actually used to run Word for DOS a bit back in the day. It was slower than ... everything else — including the admittedly harder-to-use but wildly popular WordPerfect.

At the time I couldn't imagine Word overtaking and crushing WordPerfect. But it happened.

Back to our twisted tale. I found this Lifehacker entry where one of the very best tech-book writers today, Keir Thomas (get one of his Ubuntu books already!), has an excerpt of his new "Ubuntu Kung Fu" book.

The Unix-like OS world is awash in console-based text editors. There are literally hundreds, from vi and nano to joe and emacs. But is there an actual word processor for the Unix/Linux console? Nope.

Thomas suggests running the freely downloadable Microsoft Word for DOS and using the DOSBox MS-DOS emulator to run Word as a command-line word processor.

(For specific instructions, just go to the link and scroll down until you see "Get a High-Quality (and Free) Command-Line Word Processor with Microsoft Word.").

If you just want to get your free Word for DOS, click this link and the almighty Microsoft download deity will cause it to appear on your PC. It's a self-extracting archive, so in Windows double-click it, or at a DOS prompt in the environment of your choice (A command line in windows, or the DOSBox environment in Unix/Linux) and it will turn into the executable for Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS.

Oh the humanity!

I always wondered why there wasn't a bona fide word processor for the Unix/Linux command line. I'm still wondering, but I'm laughing (inside ...) about this hack.

Did I forget to mention that Keir Thomas is a genius? He's right up there with David Pogue, Chris Negus, Carla Schroder and Mark Sobell in my pantheon of "world's greatest tech writers."