25 bucks is 25 bucks. I also feel that losing your license because you tried to save 25 bucks on MS Word seems unlikely (not legal advice).

Is the cost of Word anywhere on anyone’s hate list?

Massive amounts of people hate the SAAS model and frequent end of support for older perpetual versions.

Nobody is losing their license. Stop bringing up this straw man.

It's not even $25, it more like $10 / seat.

Because Wordcraft is faster and more stable than Word. Word rarely crashes, but it does freeze. Wordcraft is freezing about 1/2 as often as Word. For the daily grinding out docs, it's way more viable than Openoffice.

But mostly, because having a workflow entirely dependent on a single vendor seems like something to avoid if possible.

The last formatting bug I encountered was last week. Claude identified, patched, and pushed in 10 minutes.

It doesn't do VBA. However, porting VBA to WC macros is trivial for llms.

I looked at the Wordcraft repo. It has 1.5k issues and 1.2k PRs, I think all LLM coded, and many from non-contributors, with a first release just 1 month ago. Isn't this a minefield for someone to put in something that exfiltrates data, loads malware, or something else?

The project and outcome looks impressive, but I wouldn't dare to run this outside a sandbox right now.

Why become hostage to a multibillion conglomerate for "editing text"? It's asinine what people are using Word for. If engineering types need special syntax handling I get it, but lawyers.. accountants.. my god man, plain text is fine with some semi-fancy markup a la markdown renderers these days. Some tables, some red lines, some fonts.. It's trivial. It was not in the 80s but it is now.