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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Everything MS does is for the business case. Wordpad, windows, etc exist only in a capitalist context and need a financial justification to exist. It was there exactly for the reasons you state, to kill the word processor market in Windows. Previously you had all these other players but Win95 came with Wordpad for free which had a lot of functionality. For pros, you could buy Word. I don't think we appreciate how many competitors Win95 killed with all its built-in GUI apps when people upgraded from 3.1.

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.

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I don't think Notepad is going to be anything more than a basic text editor. It certainly gets new features from time to time, but it is more about making it usable in the modern world than adding advanced features like Notepad++ has.

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.

What exactly do you mean notepad can "now" edit text files? I'm pretty sure it could always edit text files.

It now has support for LF line endings and can save UTF-8-without-BOM.

> so maybe their strategy is working

I don't think there's any strategy here, with Notepad.

>Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors

That seems unlikely when Microsoft is already investing so much in VSCode.

In the era you mentioned, most new PCs came bundled with Microsoft Works. A basic word processor feels like a sensible inclusion in any OS that is useful to consumers out of the box, it was Works that was more problematic for the competition.

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.

> Works stopped being a thing eons ago

Well, some people would say that Microsoft Works is a contradiction in terms. /s

Yes, Notepad, WordPad, Paint existed to have a baseline of utility and especially when selling a complete PC setup to customers in the 1990s:

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..

Win95 was very much sold in the internet age. In fact, its large marketing push was mostly about how easy it was to get online.

We are not discussing 1985 here. By the mid to late 90s, internet access was greatly normalized.

Sorta, Win 95 was more on the cusp, predating the first internet boom by a few years, and it was certainty designed for a pre internet world. The marketing push was about how easy it was to get online with MSN. Microsoft leadership famously bet against widespread adoption and growth of the internet and put their bets heavily into MSN with the web as a hedge. The first release of Windows 95 didn’t even come with a browser.

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.

> Notepad aim for killing Notepad++ and other complex editors.

Won't ever happen. For it to even have a chance, it would need to have syntax highlighting, which Microsoft will never add.

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