How about 27 years?

No, Publisher is not the most user friendly commercial printing application.
Yes, it is improving and affordable to most business users. But...

Would like to  see Microsoft devout a team to really get this application up
to speed for professional print output (many pesty problems that aborb a lot
of time). If they do that, then I would highly recommend this program to many
of my "Office" clientele as would many of my colleagues in the printing
business.

BTW - Commercial printing application of choice these days is Adobe
InDesign. Pricey, but definitely worth the investment to anyone producing
commercial print documents on a regular basis.

Going to Print '05 in Chicago, and am very disappointed that Microsoft is
not represented. One of my goals at this convention is to find others having
to deal with Publisher files and what we can do to streamline the tedious
process of getting customer files to print to our RIPs.