A recurring theme at Irreal is the virtue of using plain text wherever you can. To my mind, using a proprietary format makes you complicit in the data loss that will inevitably occur sooner or later.
Derek Sivers agrees and has his own post on why you should write plain text files. He begins by saying that he writes down virtually everything important in his life and that he refers to that writing often. Naturally preserving those writings and making sure that they remain available is a priority. A large part of that for Sivers, as for me, is writing all that material as plain text.
Sivers mentions the usual issues of portability and freedom from the vicissitudes of commercial software vendors and the realities of their business. He also mentions the less familiar advantages of plain text such as the ability to convert it into other formats. Even if you’re required to deliver or share a document in something like a DOC file, it’s a simple matter to convert plain text to that format, all the more so if you’re writing in something like Org markup.
The other little-mentioned problem is software that requires an Internet connection to operate. I’ve written before—although I can’t find the post—about a law firm that couldn’t complete legal documents before the filing deadline because their document preparation system, which required an Internet connection, was unavailable due a problem at the vendor’s end. The horror stories write themselves.
Siver’s post is short and worth a read. You can probably read it in a couple of minutes so give it a look.
Update :
Here’s a couple of examples of people being unable to do their work because their “word processing” software was offline. I misremembered the anecdote about the lawyer: that turned out to be a hypothetical but the point stands.