Word pad was basically Word for Windows 6 and was quite usable for basic needs. Really only finally out to pasture by the free Google Docs, I’m sure wordpad killed a decent ecosystem of editors that may one day have competed with Word.
Wordpad is very basic in comparison.
Now I'm starting to see Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors. I also read that RAR support is now native in Windows, so WinRAR and other RAR programs are probably going to finally die. I think this comes with further ZIP support and improvements which means apps like 7-zip are going to be less in demand.
It does compete with Notepad++ in a sense that now, Notepad can actually edit text files, and if you want advanced features, there is VSCode. And I must admit that I don't have any use for a middle ground text editor like Notepad++ or PSPad anymore, so maybe their strategy is working.
I don't think there's any strategy here, with Notepad.
That seems unlikely when Microsoft is already investing so much in VSCode.
The floor has fallen out since then and there are so many free or cheap office productivity options. Works stopped being a thing eons ago and I would guess WordPad is rarely chosen. Disuse is a good reason to say goodbye.
Well, some people would say that Microsoft Works is a contradiction in terms. /s
At a time when there was no internet! The PC sales guy could demo the customer fancy text-editing with fonts and colours, draw pictures and even print to dot matrix! right in the store.
Today people like these minimal OS apps because they are simple, avoid bloat and feature creep, especially notepad and paint. Its probably an error on MS part to get rid of WordPad..
We are not discussing 1985 here. By the mid to late 90s, internet access was greatly normalized.
Even so, as a consumer if you had better than 14.4k dialup you were quite lucky. Almost nobody selling computers in those days was tying up a phone line to keep the internet connected for sales demos.
Won't ever happen. For it to even have a chance, it would need to have syntax highlighting, which Microsoft will never add.