Curious what kind of foisting. I'm sure people might have preferred things in word format. Its just a matter of convenience. But I doubt its foisted. I've seen PDF files to be as annoyingly common particularly in academia. I hate it but I get around by just saving my document as PDF and move on. He's just being overly dramatic.
I assure you that "Word" is foisted on people who otherwise wouldn't touch it. It's foisted in many, many ways, from project managers who ask for "a word version", to software process methodologies whose official templates are in "Word" to requirement tracking systems that demand "Word" versions of every single document, because the tracking system produces "Word" docs.
I don't think most people distinguish "Word" docs from any printed doc, except those sophisticated enough to use "Excel" to produce columnar-format data ("Word" tables are hard to do and sucky looking).
