I think his point was that Awk has an open_on_demand.

And if you know Perl, well it's not very difficult to decipher this Awk script ...

( ... oh that's were Larry got these "ideas" from ;-)

My concern is that it's neither easier nor shorter than Perl.

For comparison here a script version of my one-liner - already w/o taking advantages of command-line switches.

$\="\n";
while (<DATA>) {
    @F = split;
    unless (@FH) {
        open $FH[@FH], ">", "$_.txt" for @F;
    } else {
        print $_ shift @F for @FH;
    }
}
__DATA__
id  name  position
1   Nick  boss
2   George CEO
3   Christina CTO
[download]