Why is markdown helpful for technical research writing?

Markdown greatly simplifies the challenge of building a technical document. 
As Dheepak Krishnamurthy puts it: 
However, products like Word fail miserably at separating content from formatting. These products impose on the writer their own concept of how a document should be formatted, which I’ve found greatly hinders the writing process.
Tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs make it easy to see what a document will look on the printed page, but next to impossible to see how it will look on the web. Markdown allows the writer to focus on content instead of formatting . More importantly, it allows you to batch process documents and apply uniform styles across a document, which can be extremely useful.