Much of the information we create and use daily is locked away in Word documents. This feels familiar, but this approach has several major drawbacks that we rarely acknowledge. Beneath Microsoft’s visual veneer and the apparent simplicity of ’the cloud’ lies a structural problem. We have been addicted for decades to the so-called ‘convenience’ and scalability of the system, without ever fundamentally reconsidering how we actually handle information.

A Word document is on average a thousand times larger than a plain text file with exactly the same content. The difference? Those extra bytes consist largely of formatting, version traces, and print instructions, not information. Parseability of Word documents by machines isn’t easy and they seem self-replicating once send by attachment of an email. Other implications are : more storage space, higher costs, greater energy consumption, and lastly an environmental impact.

Additionally, this bloat makes retrieving information unnecessarily complicated. What was once intended as a convenient carrier for text has evolved into an opaque format that hinders both people and machines from working efficiently with information. It’s time to no longer accept this problem as ‘just how things are’ but to explore how it can be done differently; smarter, more sustainable, and future-proof. This pilot investigates alternatives like markdown and (ephemeral) software that’s more suited for these times.