By Jeff Hortobagyi, Cathalynn Cindy Labonte-Smith, Elizabeth Rains & Stephen Smith
Introduction
The market has remained fairly static for word-processors since MS Word was released as Multi-Tool Word Version 1.0 in 1983, it’s dominated the word-processing market. Its main competitor became WordPerfect, but that program soon fizzled out and became a minor player. Although, there are loyal WordPerfect users out there and there’s a WordPerfect Office Professional 2020 suite available, but at over $500 it’s out-priced itself out of the market. MS Word remains the heavy hitter in the word-processing world and it’s affordable for $6.40/month for the entire MS Office package, but an increasing number of free apps keep driving down its price.
In 2006, Google Docs came along and changed the way people worked. No longer did authors need to print out and make paper copies to make redlines. No longer did they need to attach large files to emails and hope they made it to the recipients. Now they could share and update documents in real-time. That same year, Scrivener 1.0 by Literature & Latte arrived and gave writers an alternative to MS Word with its Dark Mode screen on the Mac and sophisticated outlining features. Scrivener is now at version 3.0 and seems here to stay.
There are valuable add-on tools like Grammarly, or Scapple (from Literature & Latte), worth mentioning in future blogs, but they aren’t fully-fledged word-processors, thus…