And, funnily enough, the word processing tool most often used in my office (Dropbox Paper) is slower, less suited to long documents and has fewer features than the first word processor I used. Still, you can't expect your teacher of 30 years ago to foresee "the future is emojis".
People just want different software every few years, because fashion is fickle there's a natural feeling that old stuff is out of date. Slack doesn't provide any real improvement over an IRC server that keeps its logs around, but it's web-based and it has custom emojis, so...
I mean, did the first word processor you use allow collaborative working on documents available anywhere with an internet connection, constantly backed up to Dropbox servers?
Sure, the internet makes our lives a lot better, but Wordpad sticking regular .rtf files in a vanilla Dropbox folder would provide 80% of the benefit. Realtime same-file editing is convenient, but it's pretty minor really.
It was actually very useful at my last company. We used it in many different kinds of meetings. I think it will pave the way to some interesting collaborative software in the future.
Dropbox has a word processor? My god, Google's offering is bad enough and I hate when coworkers inflict it on me. I hope nobody discovers the Dropbox one.
People just want different software every few years, because fashion is fickle there's a natural feeling that old stuff is out of date. Slack doesn't provide any real improvement over an IRC server that keeps its logs around, but it's web-based and it has custom emojis, so...