> Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98.
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.
This is just not at all true of the professional world. Home and student use, sure, but in business the office suite is deeply tied into workflows, business processes, approvals, review flows, version control, data analysis, data warehouses, and so much more.
There are companies that for all intents and purposes run on Excel. This goes far beyond spreadsheets, that's just the interface, it's the live data backing onto other services, it's the plugin systems, etc. My previous company ran significant processes on Google Sheets with a lot of automation built around it.
And then there's Sharepoint and all of that, all the sharing and access control is baked through the stack and available in all the frontends, whether that's on desktop, mobile, web, etc.
None of this was around in Office '98. There were some very early reaches into these sorts of things, but they would be unrecognisable now. We've progressed nearly 30 years after all.