And so I've created my last document in Microsoft Word, a product I first began using 27 years ago.

It's not often you'll hear this refrain, but this is one user who sleeps quite soundly about deciding to hitch Office 2010  wagon to a decidedly inferior technology product.

With nary any regret, I've created my last document in Microsoft Word, a product I first began using 27 years ago. Now it's all Google Docs, all the time. And the thing is that I'm making the switch fully aware that Google remains leagues behind Microsoft when it comes to turning out "full-featured" word processors.

But it makes not a bit of difference. In a moment, I'll get into why.
First, let's give credit where it's due. MS Word is one of the best word processors I've ever used. Its designers have never failed to impress with the amount of new features they've stuffed into each new iteration of the software. And for that rarefied group of power users -- or people with too much time on their hands -- the upgrade cycle surely was welcomed. What about the rest of us? Well, we took what Microsoft Office 2010 gave us, though honestly, it was more than enough. Way more than enough, to be frank.

It's impossible to know how many people used all -- or most -- of the features in Word. I'm sure such people existed somewhere on the planet, though I rarely bumped into one. In the pre-Internet era, when Microsoft competed against the likes of Lotus and WordPerfect, that was one way to generate buzz. The "everything but the kitchen sink" approach didn't always pay off, but it was one way to impress computer magazine reviewers picking out the "best" word processor (or the "best" spreadsheet or the "best" database).

So when Google Docs became available in 2007, the folks working on Office 2010 Download apps must have laughed themselves silly. Especially the word processor, a bare-bones outgrowth of Google's earlier acquisition of Writely and starkly underfeatured compared with MS Word. In fact, Google wasn't even close to being the trailblazer in hosted office productivity apps. It was just following in the footsteps of AdventNet's Zoho, Silveroffice's Goffice, ThinkFree, Sun's OpenOffice, and Natium's Flysuite.