The homogenization continues; just as Windows is the uncontested ubiquitous desktop operating system (oh, let's just face it), so too has Word finally become the "only" cross-platform word processor available. After four long years of little more than developmental life-support-- an eternity in technological terms-- Corel has finally pulled the plug on the Mac version of WordPerfect. According to a MacWEEK article, the company finally acknowledged the product's brain-dead status on Friday, noting that the once-competitive product had never even been made PowerPC-native. The first Power Macs shipped in 1994; a PowerPC-native version of WordPerfect would have been considered late for dinner even in 1996. To make its first appearance here in 2000 would be like showing up to eat after the restaurant's closed. And appearing in 2002-- Corel says "it would have taken another two years to develop a PowerPC version"-- is tantamount to arriving after the restaurant's been shut down, condemned, razed, and rebuilt as a babyGap.

If this decision is surprising, it's only because Corel has been almost pathologically reluctant to admit what all of us had known for years: that without some serious development support (which Corel has been unwilling to give), WordPerfect for the Mac has lingered as a mere ghost of what it could have been. Remember what Word used to be in 1996? If anything, the bug-ridden nightmare marketed under the name Word 6.0 was a wide open door through which someone should have walked in and stolen the Mac word processing market right out of Redmond's hands. Instead, WordPerfect missed its perfect chance, and Microsoft held its lead by sheer brute force; everyone else used Windows, and everyone on Windows used Word.

So WordPerfect is no more. And while there are certainly alternatives to Word in the world of Mac word processors, we doubt anyone would seriously argue that any of them will knock Microsoft out of the top spot, especially across platform boundaries. AppleWorks? It's nice, but its recent backwards step to version 6.0 isn't winning many friends-- and business users would never consider it "serious" enough, despite the fact that 99% of Word users probably never touch any features other than "bold" and "italic." Nisus Writer? It's Mac-only-- not a bad thing to be, when all's said and done, but as such it's never going to be "the" de facto word processor. No, at this point Word stands alone.

So what's next for Microsoft? We figure it won't be long before it makes "the" web browser, as well. After having seen what AOLscape considers to be a "preview release" of Netscape 6, we wouldn't be terribly surprised if, before long, AOL Time Warner announces that it is exiting the web browser market entirely and reassigning all of the Netscape developers to work on next-generation chat-room technology. Sure, there'll always be alternatives like iCab and Opera and OmniWeb, but we have a hard time believing that Internet Explorer won't be the de facto standard web browser soon. But don't get too bummed out; after all, The Best Is Yet To Come...