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Why Microsoft Word must Die, by Charles Stross
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Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 14, 2013 at 12:10 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>But I don’t really see
>the problem. Write your work in whatever tool(s) you find best for you,
>then paste it or convert it to Word when it is time to submit it.
I think the article is focusing on the specific relationship between professional writers and publishers (and it’s the same for academic writers and journals) and the step concerning the submission of a manuscript.
The problem is that conversion is far from straightforward and creates additional (and frustrating) work to convert something in a superior format (e.g. LaTeX) into something inferior (Word), as far as formatting and typesetting is concerned, when the users (the publishers) are supposed to be sophisticated (and it still gets converted back into something else by the typesetters anyway).
Posted by 22111
Oct 14, 2013 at 01:02 PM
This is exactly what I think: Let them have their Word to do their work, and otherwise consider it as the exchange format with them.
But then, I read some dozen of the comments in that blog, and it was very amusing reading, it was a complete catalog of all the “mistakes” MS ever made with Word (and on Excel, you could do similar lists), and yes, it would have been preferable that Word Perfect had won, or even XyWrite, but that’s another story. I said “mistakes”, in quotes, since with all those innumerable mistakes (of which their incredibly bad formatting styles system is probably the worst), they did something right: They succeeded in imposing this format on the whole world (first, second, third), and it was certainly not a mistake to sell Word/Office very cheap to corporations, and then, after they had introduced serious activation functionality, cheap for “home/family use”, which got them their entrance into virtually every household. Now they’ve run bonkers, licence-wise, since now every (“home” and such) installation destroys one license, meaning ONE person needs to buy the same program over and over again, in order to use it on several computers, which is both a function of their willingness to not “having had” anymore (activation hardware-bound, and all the worse if you need to replace your hdd or such), and their greediness now they think they can do everything in the open, so they now show their “real face”, when in fact, for Office 2002 and 2003 applications, it was NOT a problem yet to change your hdd or even to install them on some other computer, even, if over the years, this made some 5 installations for one licence, by hdd changings, by two laptops dying, and so on. This means, for some years, MS could be trusted to not steal from you if you didn’t try to steal from them, and those years are gone now.
As Zeoli says, most people do not want to get into technical specifics, so they don’t have some text expander by AHK or such, everywhere, but they are very happy with Word’s proprietary text expander, so they are eager to write in Word, wherever they are. Let ‘em do it, but it’s amusing to read, here and there, what incredible problems they all face. In the early days, you could buy Word, or WordPerfect, for very similar a price, which was more than 800 Deutschmark in 1985 or so, and which was big money then, no comparison with 400 euro or 550 dollars what it would “be” now, rather 1500 euro or such, in value.
And then, from this starting point, Word got to almost every corporation “seat”, when WP did not, so marketing-wise, MS must have done many things right in those early years; similar for their operating system and everything else. And now, with their integrational efforts, they try to get hold of every corporation data/info there is, world-wide, in real time.
Well, observe dogs: The little ones throw themselves on the beck, presenting their neck. That’s what MS customers do and always have done. It’s a minority that becomes early adopters of XyWrite and askSam… and then such programs die, from lack of funding, since “select” is a beautiful word, but doesn’t pay the developers’ rent. You see, the real problem behind all this (meaning, behind the fact that marketing plays such a predominant role) ist the fact that most people don’t have any problems to present their neck, against somebody strong, so they don’t feel this sentiment of injustice some of us feel when the give their money to the market leader, instead of the vendor offering finest technology, so evil (or call it smartness in marketing) pays: it doesn’t encounter that rejection some of us would judge appropriate in such cases - by the way, in politics you see the same phenomenon, and in who gets promoted within your corporation, too: people cherish power, and then they buy.
Or how come people even accepted and paid for ribbons?