The rise of Markdown
Mat Duggan in Markdown Ate The World:
Markdown doesn't do most of what those formats do. You can't set margins. You can't do columns. You can't embed a pivot table or track changes or add a watermark that says DRAFT across every page in 45-degree gray Calibri. Markdown doesn't even have a native way to change the font color.
And none of that mattered, because it turns out most writing isn't about any of those things. Most writing is about getting words down in a structure that makes sense, and then getting those words in front of other people. Markdown does that with less friction than anything else ever created. You can learn it in ten minutes, write it in any text editor on any device, read the source file without rendering it, diff it in version control, and convert it to virtually any output format.
Informative and well-written post from Mat on Markdown's rise to prominence over the past few years. Lots of fascinating information in the backstory detailing the .doc and .docx formats about which I knew next to nothing. I just realised a few years ago that plain text was the way to go, and Markdown was the obvious choice at that point. Now I know more about why that was the case.