Microsoft Works

~ the goodbye ~

microsoft works was on every cheap windows pc i ever touched in a relative's house. it shipped preinstalled on the boxes that did not qualify for a real office license, which in turkey around 2000 meant pretty much every compaq presario or hp pavilion that came home with a bundled monitor and a printer. you opened works word processor, you typed a school assignment, you saved it as a.wps file, and then the next year nobody could open the.wps file anymore.

the suite shipped from 1987 to 2009. inside it had a word processor and a spreadsheet, both built to look like the office versions without actually being them. there was also a database that nobody i ever met admitted to using. the whole thing existed because microsoft needed a productivity story for the bottom shelf of the oem market without giving away real office for free.

it died in late 2009 when microsoft announced that office starter edition would take over the role on new windows 7 machines. starter kept the word processor and the spreadsheet but dropped the database and the calendar. the rest of office sat behind a buy-now button. nobody mourned works specifically, but a generation of family computers stopped being able to open the documents they had been saving for fifteen years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the works business model was clever in a depressing way. microsoft sold full office for hundreds of dollars to the people who actually needed it. for everyone else, the discount was: you can have a thing that looks like office and is just functional enough that you do not pirate the real one. the.wps and.xlr file formats were quietly incompatible with.doc and.xls, which kept works users one step away from the corporate file ecosystem.

the irony is that this strategy did the opposite of what microsoft wanted. people who got works on their home pc and tried to email a.wps file to a colleague at work got back "i can't open this." most of them eventually paid for office anyway. the rest pirated it.

~ what replaced it ~

works did the same job in the windows ecosystem that the old appleworks suite did on macs. it was the bundled "you have software now, you do not need to buy anything else" pitch on the box of low-end home pcs. it was not loved, but it was extensively used by people who did not realize they were using a stripped-down version of anything.

~ what got buried with it ~

the.wps file format mostly. there is a converter microsoft put out in 2009 that opens old works documents in word, but it gets installed by maybe one in ten people who need it. somewhere in turkey there are dvd-r backups from 2003 with school assignments saved in.wps that nobody alive can read without going looking for that converter. it is the small everyday version of the bigger format-loss story.

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