I understand what you're saying and in some ways your right, but after spending a year supporting a 250 person editorial department in a web company that publishes a lot of copy, the author is "more right"
Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.)
To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.
Word defaults to a print document focus, but it also has others and they are easy to switch between. There are five prominent views: "Print Layout", "Full Screen Reading", "Web Layout", "Outline" and "Draft".
It sounds like you want the "Web Layout" (or possibly "Draft" view).
Keep in mind that the author is also talking as a consumer of word documents that someone else wrote. I would wager that he knows about these various options but that doesn't mean that the people whose documents he is consuming know about them.
His rant is partly centered around the fact that word's default settings are poorly chosen for someone in the digital publishing world.
Word, with all it's features, benefits, and menus does not cater to the world of digital text swapping and collaboration. Compared to a plain text editor, the print document focus in Word means that users need to make several annoying modifications to every document they work with, and if you're publishing stuff online you'll work with many documents. And to top it all, a Microsoft Office application will be by far the slowest app on an Apple computer, regardless of the specs of the machine. (it'll start faster than photoshop, but slower in terms of responsiveness.)
To understand this perspective, you have to understand the program the author compares Word to, TextEdit, is the notepad.exe of the Apple world.