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If you think about it, Wordpad was always just the free "lite" edition of Word for people who didn't buy Office to use. Like Outlook Express was to Outlook.

But in the world we seem to be heading toward, where you can only log into Windows with a Microsoft account, and where your Microsoft 365 subscription state controls which "edition" or "desktop experience" of Windows you get as said logged-in user (regardless of which machine you're logged into)... there'd be no need for Wordpad.

In that world, Word the software package would always be pre-installed. (Why? Because even if you aren't paying for M365, someone who is could always log into your PC as a roaming user; and that person would want Word to work immediately without having to wait for it to download+install.)

And in a world where Word the software package is always preinstalled, then Microsoft could just let anyone launch Word (whether they have an M365 subscription or not); and then, at launch, rather than just putting a paywall in the face of anyone without an M365 subscription, Word could instead use the logged-in user's M365 licensing state to determine whether the spun-up Word process should run the full-fat Word UI, or some kind of degraded unpaid-mode Word UI.

And "Word running with some kind of degraded unpaid-mode UI" could be every bit the "Word lite" offering that Wordpad is. Which makes Wordpad itself redundant.

(The only weird part to me, is that they deprecated/removed Wordpad before pulling the trigger on all of this.)