blogs for industry...blogs for the dead
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Randy Barnett and Glenn Reynolds bemoan the suckiness of Microsoft Word. Via Randy's trackbacks, I find that Rita at Res Ipsa Loquitur, and Tom Veal at Stromata Blog pile on. Far be it from me to disagree. I held out for a long time as part of the cult of WriteNow WriteNow represents an ideal Macintosh application, hence it was a commercial failure.Despite being written in 68000 assembler, WriteNow continues to run nicely on newer Macs, including in Classic mode on Panther. I don't know if it's been tried on Tiger, but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. WriteNow wasn't perfect for precise page layout - it had a tendency to vary the whitespace at the top of a page, as I recall, but it never did the spontaneous weird page redesign that Word likes to do...especially close to an important deadline. What ultimately pushed me to Word? Two things. First, the usual - exchanging documents with Word users was getting to be a pain...interestingly RTF exchange with Wordperfect users was always fine, even several years after WriteNow stopped releasing updates. By contrast converting to and from Word files was always a nightmare...not unlike dealing with HTML from Word files today. The other factor was EndNote. Lawyers may use footnotes, but biologists mostly use endnotes, and EndNote integrated itself into Word in ways that were just not available for the word processors with smaller market share. With respect to the title - Barnett writes: I have been word processing since I paid $4500 for an NBI standalone word processor in 1981, and word processing programs are simply not supposed to be that hard to figure out and control.Barnett may have me beat...I wrote my MS around then on the Apple II Pascal editor. I also remember figuring out how to transfer files from one of those dedicated word processors so that I wouldn't have to reenter published manuscripts into my dissertation. Word is most definitely not from the earliest days of word processing, and in the earliest days the lines between word processors, memory typewriters, and programming text processors like EMACS - and its predecessors - are pretty blurry. I'm not convinced that Word is harder to figure out and control than those old word processors were. Remember WordStar? Remember those cards that fit over keyboards? The main problem with Word isn't the complexity - with perseverence, one can turn off many of the more annoying features. It's the psychotic unpredictability. Writing with Word is too much like Russian roulette. Make backups...lots of backups.
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