[Romario77]

Notepad++ might be too much for a simple utility.

Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.

And you could see how adding new things adds vulnerabilities. In this case they added ability to see/render markdown and with markdown they render links, which in this case allowed executing remote code when user clicks on a link.

[breppp]

> Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.

Wordpad was the bundled rich text editor and was also a mess

I don't think an improved notepad could have cannibalized Word