>For laypeople, that may be fine. MS Word was atrociously bad for high-volume typing.
Totally agree. That's one of the reasons why law firms and their typists hung on to Wordperfect-DOS for a decade even after MS Word was mainstream. Very long legal documents that would choke MS Word worked fine in WordPerfect DOS.
Yep - I'd forgotten about law firms. I was a delivery driver for a couple law firms in the early 90s. I was seeing most stuff at university done on MS Word at that point, but every law firm was still on Word Perfect. The industry around vertical markets for WP was pretty strong for a long time it seemed.
For laypeople, that may be fine. MS Word was atrociously bad for high-volume typing. Had family in transcription, and they could fly with WordPerfect, doing > 100 WPM. This was a combination of having external tools ("plugins", effectively, to do word expansion with macros), WP being DOS-based (faster screen UI/etc), and, to some measure, experience.
One family member got switched to MS Word on Windows. Well.. the whole department did. They suffered through an immediate drop to about 60% of previous productivity, and it took a couple of years and severe hardware upgrades to get most of the people back to around 80% of previous productivity levels.
Why switch? MS was bundling the whole offering and tempting the company to upgrade. The management of an 'integrated stack' was seen as attractive, and the massive drop off in dept-level productivity was accepted. Management still bitched that stuff was late, and quality dropped, but... hey, network admins have a bit less work to do, and some other dept saved a few bucks.
The bundling/integration of stuff on to the OS was a big selling point, even when it led to demonstrably poorer results for some parties involved. Cool! - there's a menu with a button to do some funky text manipulation. That only takes 8 seconds instead of "having" to memorize some arcane keystrokes. When the keystrokes are memorized, though, it takes .4 seconds to accomplish the same thing.