Ah, yes Gresham was the name I was groping for. But as far back as Aristophanes, too? My Word! (If I may use that exclamation in this company without detriment.) <<Does it also apply to computer programs?>> Well, it did apply to MS-based programs, and I have a(n) hypothesis how that came to be. I do not attribute it primarily to the "the herd mentality of bureaucratized corporations", though that was certainly fertile soil for the seed to have fallen upon. The seed must first have been strewn, however. Cast your minds back to the days when MS-Windows was still in its infancy: Win3.11, Win95, Win98--these were primarily gaming platforms intended for the home market. They delivered with oodles of graphics and music drivers, Plug-&-Play for the non-geeky, joy sticks and color monitors. The professional world was not using MS-Windows at that time. The professional world was running Unix (for big number crunching), Mac OS (graphic design and publishing), Sun, IBM OS/2, or Novell for office applications (messaging, file sharing, etc.). Anybody out there remember Lotus Notes? WinNT was MS's big leap into the corporate market, the first MS OS which came in server and client versions. Word came wrapped up in the bundle, along with PowerPointless (presentations), Excess (tables with calculations), and Access (db). MS knew they were up against corporate giants (Novell, IBM) and a vast pre-installed base. MS actually _paid_ customers to dump their Novell servers and install MS-based ones. I know because I was doing Cisco training at the time, and I suddenly saw rows and rows of Novell engineers out of work, desperate to get retained as networkers because they had been chucked out of their server departments and replaced by MS-trained server engineers. Once corporations got hooked on the MS OS, they just took the MS-apps (Word, etc.) line and sinker. Aggressive marketing, not features or functionality, triumphed. That's my theory anyway. <MD FL>