Free and Open Source Software

I think the main reason why Word is losing mindshare, is because it was designed for paper. The whole formatting system makes the assumption that there's a fixed width and height into which your text and images fit. In reality, a phone screen is a lot narrower and a widescreen monitor a lot wider.

Markdown never made these assumptions. For the most part simply because plain text reflows to fill whatever space you give it. But there's no way to position an image either, I imagine mostly for simplicity's sake. It can look goofy at times, but it never looks broken.
That's why I can write this comment on my phone and someone else can look at it on desktop and it's perfectly readable in both scenarios.

You can see that M$ staunchly opposes it as they never allow it in any of their tools. The only one that they've used is the * to make bulleted lists. I hope that it is the death of their software as open source alternatives slowly strip away their shoddy and ill-equiped tools.

The author would do well to look up SGML; Markdown is fundamentally about sugaring the syntax for tag-oriented markup and is defined as a superset of HTML, so mistaking it for something like TeX or Word really demonstrates a failure to engage with Markdown per se. I suppose that the author can be forgiven somewhat, considering that they are talking to writers, but it's yet another example of how writers really only do research up to the point where they can emit a plausible article and get paid.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft bought PowerPoint, GitHub, LinkedIn, and many other things—but it did in fact create Word and Excel. Microsoft is, in essence, a sales company. It’s not too great at designing software.

So close to a real insight! The correct lesson is that Microsoft, like Blizzard, is skilled at imitating what's popular in the market; like magpies, they don't need to have a culture of software design as long as they have a culture of software sales. In particular, Microsoft didn't create Word or Excel, but ripped off WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

The only times I don't use markdown, I use org-mode

The focus on Microsoft is odd. I remember most people using WordPerfect for DOS and other non-WYSIWYG word processors up until around 1993. These were much better for focusing on writing. MS Word came from behind and started to take over as Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 became standard. Word wasn't the best word processor back then and was very buggy, but Microsoft succeeded in marketing it as a natural companion for Windows and bundling it with Excel and PowerPoint, and WordPerfect was slower to move to WYSIWYG.

The rise of the web was also happening at that time, and this article doesn't give it enough attention as a major influence on document format and a motivation behind markdown.

Honestly, this is a pretty badly written and researched article for someone that likes writing so much.

Like, just the opening two paragraphs about Microsoft controlling document formats ... They repeat the same information in both paragraphs and give a rather incomplete history of document formatting.

It's also wild to write that many words about Markdown and never discuss its connection to HTML and its foundation in formatting via declarative intent rather than imperative formatting instructions (i.e. in markdown you dont style your title by saying bold / underling / font-size:20, you declare your true intent which is this is the top level title / heading, but that all comes from the underlying structure of HTML which markdown is basically just a simplification of.

I use markdown for pretty much everything, and I agree with the overall notion of this rundown, but —

Seeing weird characters when you copy-paste from AI? That’s because ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others use Markdown to format their responses.

Yeah, maybe that's not the gotcha the author thought it would be.

Markdown — so stupid simple even stochastic parrots can figure it out is a slogan that will age like milk.