End of the road

In 1989 I bought my first personal computer, an IBM PS/2 for I think around £2,300. Stupid money, certainly but at the time I thought I'd go on from the MBA to a high paying job (little did I know).  That machine in some ways altered my life subtly but profoundly. But that's another story. This is about my journey with Microsoft "killed apps".

The first useful software I installed was Windows 3.1 and Harvard Graphics. Lotus 123 for DOS was also on that machine (and OS/2 was for a while too). I know I ran DOS Word 5.0 and World 2.0 for Windows on it. 

The next two machines were Mac clones (the PowerPC 6500 and 7300 - I still have the latter). I still remember the excitement when I installed World 6.0 on the 7300 in about 1995. It came with a fancy splash screen (with a pen across the middle).

While at home I was on a Mac, in the office (at the Circle Internationale) I had a Compaq running Windows NT with Word 97.

When we moved to the US in 1999, I bought a Dell with Windows NT. Thereafter I started building my own boxes; I think I'm on the third or fourth now. Since 2000, I've used Word (and Office) 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010 (which I'm still using), 2013, and 2016.

I had three Mac laptops at work but the Microsoft implementation of Office on the Mac was never really satisfactory. For a long time it had no visual basic macros.   

I had a copy of Office 2007 running in Windows under VM which was the most reliable means of getting Office functionality in Linux at the time (and arguably sill is) . 

The enhancements, which in the early days from one version to the next were dramatic, have become increasingly marginal to the point where from a functional standpoint I can't tell the difference between 2013 and 2016. Although keeping up with the latest version has been hampered by running Linux, I am still happily running software that is a decade old.

Today I downloaded a copy of Office 2016 for my home desktop (my work laptop I think has it installed but actually I'm not sure without looking which version I'm running on it). That's when I realized that it is probably the last desktop version of Office I will buy. For 30 years I've been eagerly (though recently less so) waiting to see what the next version brings, but now that journey is over.  At least for the killer apps, I have reached the end of the road.