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Subject:Re: Word in 2010 From:"Kevin Amery" <kevindamery -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Tue, 8 May 2007 14:27:50 -0400
On 5/8/07, Wilhelm, Joel <jwilhelm -at- athenati -dot- com> wrote:
> I'm *not* saying it's a good thing. Just:
>
> 1. It makes sense for M-soft.
> 2. It would make life easier on one level for many small companies.
> (maybe)
>
> Joel
>
Ok, fair enough. Now that that's cleared up...
It may make things easier for small companies in terms of not having
too many solutions to evaluate and having the fallback of just doing
it in Word. I would suggest, though, that choosing Word as your
authoring tool just because it comes with the latest batch of systems
is a risky way of selecting a tool. It's not that you can't write tech
docs with Word (many list members do just that) but it's not always
the ideal tool.
For example, if you're at a small company that employs one writer, and
you want to compare the cost of using Word to, say, Authorit (since it
was mentioned previously in the thread). I haven't priced either
recently, but let's say that Authorit costs $1000 more than Word at
the end of the day (just to pull a number out of thin air). If Word
can meet all of your docs requirements, great: you've just saved some
money. But OTOH, if working with Word ends up taking up, say, two
hours more of your time per day on the same tasks, how many days does
it take before lost productivity eats up your cost savings?
But the big thing to me is, Microsoft doesn't aim Word (or any of its
other productivity apps) at professionals. They aim it at the broad
market of word processing users. So it has things like wizards that
decide what type of formatting you want instead of letting you decide,
auto-correct your spelling, *attempt* to save you time at numbered
lists.... It doesn't give you the pin point control that a tool like
Authorit or FrameMaker or Flare does. For 98% of Word users, that's
fine: no one in administration is going to lose their job because
their lists aren't consistent. But for us, pin point control is
essential.
To get back to your original question (is it worth waiting to see if
Microsoft produces a single sourcing tool) I'd say "no." Word 2007 is
out now: the previous version was out in 2003, the one before that in
2000, and before that 1997. I think we can assume the next version
won't arrive until 2010 or later. Do you really want to wait 3 years
and hope that Microsoft implements SS? (To the best of my knowledge,
they haven't said anything about it, so they may not implement it then
either, if at all.) Basically, if you need SS, you probably need it
sooner than that. And if you don't need SS, it's irrelevant.
--
Until next time...
Kevin Amery
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