Microsoft adds 13 new features to Word based upon one man’s offhanded feedback

Developers in the Office division at Microsoft have been hard at work implementing the ideas of a rambling support post on the Office forums. The post from 38 year old Sasha Kerns suggests a few things which the Microsoft Word team could do differently in their product.

Taking customer feedback very seriously, the Office team has been working on adding all of the features Sasha asked for. A few new drop downs and a couple of new boxes to be checked by default will now enable the Word developers to say they listen to user feedback.

“Adding to the overwhelming complexity of a 35 year old piece of software is what working at Microsoft is all about” remarked one member of the Office team. Tools like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and most of all Outlook have been devolving as products for longer than most programing languages have been around. To continue to keep these monolithic applications on life support for this long is quite the feat of hubris.

These new features will be rolling out to Microsoft internal insider rings, then external rings, then Office Insiders, then Fast ring insiders, then seekers, then leaders, then they will be broadly available over the next 2 to 30 months for all users.