Before software complaints became app-store reviews, angry tweets, and one-star screenshots, somebody had to buy a domain, write several thousand words, and explain exactly why the program deserved to be thrown into the sea.
The page known as MS Word Sucks is a fine specimen of that older Internet tradition. It is not a tidy product review. It is a sustained grievance against Microsoft Word, written with the energy of someone who has been interrupted by AutoCorrect one time too many.
By 2004 the essay was circulating widely enough to become the subject of a Slashdot discussion, where readers quoted some of its more volcanic passages and immediately began arguing about Word, OpenOffice, LaTeX, document formats, user interfaces, and whether the author’s suffering was self-inflicted.
That reaction is almost as historically useful as the rant itself.
Software used to inspire manifestos
The complaints are recognizable even now: unwanted formatting, preferences that refuse to stay put, automatic features that feel less like assistance than sabotage, document behavior the user did not request, and the suspicion that increasingly complicated software had stopped serving the person sitting in front of it.
What makes the page feel old is not the subject. People still hate software.
It is the form.
A frustrated user did not need to compress the complaint into 280 characters or optimize it for a video. He could publish a plain HTML page, swear at Microsoft for as long as necessary, and leave it sitting on the public Web where search engines, mailing lists, forums, and friends would eventually find it.
The Web was full of pages like this: personal essays that were too opinionated for documentation, too specific for journalism, and too long for anyone except the author and the exact stranger who desperately needed to know that somebody else had noticed the same stupid behavior.
That is why these pages matter as artifacts. They preserve the emotional history of computing, not merely the release history.
Microsoft Word can be documented through version numbers, file formats, screenshots, and feature lists. A rant tells you what using the software felt like to at least one technically literate person while those design decisions were still current annoyances rather than historical curiosities.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes pages like this because old software culture was partly built from documentation and partly built from people yelling at the documentation.
Sometimes the rant ages badly.
Sometimes, twenty years later, you read it and immediately recognize the exact argument.