I strongly believe Word peaked with Word 4.2 on the Mac - System 6, 1Mb RAM. There are those who would argue 5.1a on the Mac because it included envelope printing, but it was much, much slower and needed more like 2 or 4Mb.

Then they unified the version numbers across the platforms and moved to this pcode stuff in v6. This was so bad and so slow on the Mac that they actually issued an apology for it. Things have gone downhill since then, and v6 was released 1994.

I've programmed Win32 for decades and while it was fine for the time, much of the user facing APIs are obsolete for modern GUI development and some of the non-user facing stuff too. But Microsoft really hasn't produced a credible replacement for it and has shat out a succession of technologies one after the other that devs are supposed to use before Microsoft abandons them for the next - Win32 (and layers on top like MFC), WinForms, WPF (and Silverlight), UWP, Windows App SDK / WinUI.

Some of these technologies are overlapping, but each was intended to coral devs into making Metro apps or Windows Store apps and burn their bridges in the process. It went down like a lead balloon. Now they're dialing back trying to make WinUI somewhat platform agnostic to the version of Windows its running on but who knows if it will stick. It's not the only pain point because Microsoft even extended the C++ language to deal with these APIs with new types like "ref", "partial" and hat notation to deal with garbage collected objects, auto generated classes and other things that also impedes portability.

So it's no wonder that app developers have gone for web apps (and QT) because it's makes it easier to write portable apps and acts as insulation from Microsoft's mercurial view of the world.

some end in .com but oh god yes I HATE the term app.

I used the hell out of MS Works. It did what I needed quickly and without the HUGE bloat of M$Office and Word. Though I came from a GML background so it was easy...

LMAO...I wish I had mod points...you deserve it.

If "the problem is peer pressure" then the nicotine/tobacco industry should have NO PROBLEM with ads / promotions / marketing / sponsorship being banned right?

The reality is that vapes are in the same situation as tobacco in the 70s and 80s deliberately using marketing of people looking cool and sexy to get people hooked on this shit. The way to stop people getting hooked is to remove all prominence of the product and make it hard and extreme risk for a business to sell to kids. And to make the product less affordable by banning disposable vapes. And to make the product less attractive in terms of flavours and such.

These are all obvious measures. Will it stop all kids from vaping? Of course not. But it will stop a lot. And that's why tobacco / nicotine lobby REALLY want things to stay as loose as they are now. They need a constant stream of new addicts and anything that threatens that is detrimental to their business model.

It takes a while to learn how to effectively use new tech, especially powerful tech that is rapidly changing
Expect more confusion and disruption before things stabilize

For most of humanity even the most creative jobs had a bit of thinking and a ton of drudge work.

Now, for certain jobs, the drudge work is gone, and all that is left is thinking.

Real thinking is very very hard. The human brain uses more energy than any muscle, even the heart.

Trying to do the real thinking 100% of the time is draining. It's like playing chess for 8 hours rather than 30 minutes.

Make the penalties of selling vapes to minors so huge that companies won't do it. And ban vapes from appealing to minors in the first place - zero advertising, zero promotion of vapes, a total ban on disposable vapes and limited flavours, i.e. they are not visible in stores, they are not advertised online or TV, they don't sponsor events / sports, they may not have a social media presence of any kind.

Does not matter how much tech they use to increase efficiency.

If your company is firing people, it is past it's prime. It may be a solid, safe investment, but it is not going to double profits for the next two years.

Everyone despises car dealers but they do perform an important role selling cars somewhere between wholesale price and MSRP. If automakers want to sell direct to the consumer then the online operation should be operate under the same terms and conditions as dealers. i.e. it might say "Ford" on the website, but it's really a separate siloed franchise that has to deal with Ford just like any other franchised dealer.

The problem you get though is what I call the "California Cancer Warning Problem"
Basically, people can only pay attention to so many warnings. The more often people get false or trivial warnings, warnings where they have to continue to get things done as standard, the more likely they are to just plain ignore the warnings.

While hackers might be able to figure out a way to do something malicious without triggering the warning, the warnings back then were worse than useless, because they not only triggered for just about every document, users by default could not assess the document for safety without enabling the scripting. IE I couldn't by default open the document and look at the scripts to assess them (and some of them were only like a dozen lines) without enabling them.

Saying the warnings were necessary also ignores that there have been exploits that didn't even require opening a document to cause infection. Preview was enough.

Basically, if the hackers figured out something clever, just add that to the check. It would still be a better situation than what we had back then.

They are continuing to follow fads and introduce new "features" that nobody wants, and that can't easily be uninstalled
They need to stop adding this crap, and provide easy ways to uninstall it
They need to use every tool they have, including AI, to find bugs and security weaknesses
If something is good, people will choose it voluntarily and even pay for it
If something is installed by default and can't be removed, it's likely not good
We need a reliable OS

The USPS was designed for letters. Now letter volume is way down and package volume is increasing rapidly. Small post offices that were designed for letters are overwhelmed with packages. Delivery vehicles are small. To properly handle high package volume, a lot of facilities would need to be upgraded or replaced

Does it work?
Kids are smart and really good at finding workarounds
The likely outcome is political theater, where politicians claim success while kids get creative
The other likely outcome is annoyance and failure when the tech goes wrong