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Let's try and bring this back to the original example. If WordPad cost money who would use it and not one of the much more robust competitors?
It does cost money. Windows licenses aren't free.
> We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf Doesn’t Office require a paid license on top of the Windows license, unlike WordPad?
Install LibreOffice. If you were using WordPad before, LibreOffice will be a fine replacement for your purposes. https://www.libreoffice.org/
Yeah of course they wouldn't recommend a competitor, but to me that makes it seem like this announcement is an attempt to get a handful more people to buy Word by removing a finished and functional product that was fast and available to anyone with a Windows computer
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.
Too bad they can’t open-source it and see if there is any community interest in keeping it going.
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I'm not sure if that's the case for LibreOffice, but it's common for FOSS projects to have fatter binaries for Windows, since they're often using a bunch of wrappers to get POSIX-y things to work Windows. In this case they're also shipping rpm/deb packages, it's likely that on Linux they use your system's GTK and in Windows they bundle it.
> it's likely that on Linux they use your system's GTK and in Windows they bundle it. They have their own toolkit - VCL - which has GTK and Qt backends for Linux, and a native Windows backend for Windows.
This is a shame. I still use is to open RTF and DOCX files.
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WordPad had one real use in my world: if you edited a Linux document in WordPad it was smart enough to not mess up the line endings CR/LF versus LF IIRC. It was nice to not have to worry.
But doesn't a basic text editor like notepad++, or sublime text, I guess nowadays people use vscode too, take care of that? Why would you want to use some kind of rich text editing program for those?
But the point is moot now that they added support for this to Notepad. Dunno if there are still supported versions of Windows out there that don't have it, but at least the newer systems should
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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 man…
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…
I don't think there's any strategy here, with Notepad.
One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack. This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus.…
Who can forget the first time they opened Wordpad and then tried to drag a text document into the window to edit it, just like you do with Notepad, only to have the text document turn into an icon inside of the empty text document you had open. Fun times.
>There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision Actually, I have a reason to be outraged by this decision. I like using WordPad, and it will take me time and effort to find an adequate replacement for a simple note-taking application.
so keep using it? ending development doesn't mean the executable stops working. the good news for you is this is essentially a promise that wordpad will never change.
> will be removed in a future release of Windows
to mean it's not just unmaintained (indeed that's fine) but actively removed from your computer