Your 350 page thesis was, I am sure, written much more slowly than it would have been if it were written on a word processor that had appropriate features. I want to be as productive as possible, not use archaic tools just because I let a company dictate
my tool set. I can buy a tool from another company.
Also, not everyone who uses Word is an academic. Most are not. Business-people who use Word are not "scholars" and just need the software to work and work well. They do not need to be proud of their grammar.
Meanwhile, Microsoft cannot claim that these features were removed "to save space" if they are also claiming they want to restore these features. That seems irrational, unless they only wanted to save space on the launch of the product, to mislead their
consumers about the true space cost of Word, which is unethical.
Yes, my paper was written very slowly, over many drafts on canary yellow copy paper, eventually approved by my thesis advisor, before being typed onto blue-ruled Corrasable Bond thesis paper using an IBM Selectric (notCorrecting). A word processor would have saved considerable time in the production (though it was the research and writing that were time-consuming), especially in the final draft, which required frequent changes of type balls for italics and Greek,
and manually rolling the carriage down for superscript numerals (at least I was allowed to use endnotes; footnotes, which I often had to use for papers I typed later for hire, often required retyping a page if I miscalculated). I do not deny that word processors
have made work a lot easier for us all--and those of us who have not always had them probably appreciate them more than others.
As for non-academic Word users, I was replying directly to a post that referenced "anyone who does scholastic writing."
Nowhere have I seen the claim (certainly not from Microsoft) that these features were removed "to save space." The explanation that has been provided was that they were removed to improve them. Perhaps a better decision would have been to leave the old,
unimproved tools in place until the new, improved ones were available, but I get the sense (based on correspondence with those who are working on the project) that this is presenting unanticipated problems and taking longer than expected.
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