Re: Re Word/Weird

Subject: Re: Re Word/Weird
From: Dan Emory <danemory -at- primenet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 17:03:09 -0700 (MST)

Bill Hall wins the award for the most devastatingly dead-on description of
what havoc MS-Word can wreak on a tech pubs operation. His suggestion about
a class action lawsuit against Billygate has merit. The worst think of all
about Word is that, when an outfit like Tenix finally realizes the damage
that Word has wrought, and they consider other options, Microsoft delivers
them the ultimate Gotch: Word is devilishly and deliberately designed to
defeat any attempt to convert legacy documents to other formats with any
acceptable degree of success. The oxymoronish RTF "Standard" is a moving
target for those who try to build filters, and each new version of Word has
its own set of deliberately perverse traps for confounding attempts at
successful conversion to other formats. This has been, for many years,
Micrsoft's method of forcing its huge installed base to stay with this
unwieldy, progressively more buggy, worthless-feature bloated piece of crap.
That, combined with Microsoft's efforts to corrupt the HTML and XML
standards, are the most flagrant evidences of its monopolistic practices.
What other DTP product besides Word could possibly get away with
deliberately making it difficult for its users to convert to other DTP formats?
=============================================================================
At 09:07 AM 5/3/00 +1000, HALL Bill wrote:
(excerpted to stay below 31 lines)
>Why do I hate Word?-
>More importantly, critical company documents (e.g., tender responses,
>contracts, internal procedures etc.) are all still drafted in MS Word.
>Our Word users are intelligent and dedicated engineering and legal type
staff, >but receive little or no training in how to manage the monstrously
huge and >complex MS Word application we give them as a tool for producing
documentation >that is critical to our survival as a company.
>The result is catastrophic. Except for myself and some of our tech doc
people, >no one in >the company understands how to create and manage Word
styles, and >given that Word's paragraph numbering functions are quirky and
bug ridden, they >often create difficulties in my own documents. In the
hands of intelligent >users the style functions are lethal.
>The bottom line is that our critical knowledge authors are spending up to
>50% or more of their time trying to make their writing tool behave rather
>than focussing on the content they must create to make a profit and keep new
>business coming in through the door.
>Even in my own writing - which is essentially a one-person shop, I find Word
>to be a hugely complex and fundamentally flawed tool.
>Either way, even as a single user, I still conservatively waste
>10-20% of my time fighting Word problems rather than focussing on the
>content of my documents.
>Aside from the productivity issues, to have billygate's smirking doodads
>bouncing all over the place to distract and get in the way, and his auto
>(un)correct and (un)format functions arbitrarily and unhelpfully altering my
>work is the last bloody straw. (And with every new version, it takes weeks
>to find out where he has hidden the traps so they can be turned off.) I have
>to use MS Word as a broken tool virtually every day of my life - is it any
>wonder that I (and apparently many others fighting these application wars)
>hate the product more than anything else in their lives?
====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory -at- primenet -dot- com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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