Just lost five pages of work when Microsoft Word locked up. Yes, I was in the writing groove, and dumb for not saving it. Still, it bugs the hell out of me that so far this year, the only apps I’ve had lock up are Safari (like, twice), and Word (at least eight or ten times), and in past, when I was still using MSIE, it was another frequent offender. This is why I mostly use TextEdit, BBEdit Lite, or uEdit, except when I’m trying to make sure my formatting will be portable: as much as I like .rtf files, and as much as I dislike Microsoft, Word is pretty much ubiquitous.
I used WordPerfect for years, until it got so scarce that I had a hard time getting files to and from other people. (And besides which, Corel is where good software goes to die: via failure to market and failure to innovate, they’ve done a fine job of killing off many an excellent application.) I tried to get by without Word, but it didn’t work, and so now I’m paying the price. I mean, Word is mostly a nice, powerful program, with lots of cool stuff. I just wish it wasn’t built to crash.
Are Microsoft’s coders malicious, or just pathetic?
I still use WordPerfect 8 (at home, anyway) because I’m stubbornly in denial about its dying out. And because I don’t like Word either, ubiquitous though it is.
Have you tried TextPad? I’ve been using it for basic text-editing at my part-time job, and liked it so much that I downloaded it for my home computer as well.
Ah, yes…save early, save often. Have you tried OpenOffice? It can open any .doc file, as well as other file extensions, but I don’t know how it works for Macs. Abiword is good too. I ditched Microsoft Word over a year ago; I’d had it for about three years, and all of a sudden, every time I tried to open it, it would give me that “illegal operation and will be shut down” garbage.
Amanda, BBEdit Lite and uEdit are kind of the Mac counterparts to TextPad, all of which I’ve used and like a lot for bare-bones text editing; I totally agree with you there. Clancy, I’ve used AbiWord via X11 on the Mac — it works, mostly, but they haven’t gotten to making it a native Mac OS X application yet, and it shows in the interface. And OpenOffice won’t be Mac-native until 1Q2006, unfortunately. I’ll play more with X11, and see if I can actually manage to get used to running Unix apps that way: it’d definitely be nice.
I know the last question was probably just for effeect, but since I know, it’s hard to resist answering… Individually, MSFT’s coders are quite good, and not especially malicious that I recall. But MSWord drove competitors from the market by repeatedly shipping huge feature-sets that were 95% done, and by now the Word team is dealing with ((.95)^8)-done inherited code, which is about 66% done. 95% done is quite usable. 66% done is a nightmare to maintain, related to the old Mythical Man-Month problem.
Sort of like a precedent-based legal system, but it developed more quickly.
Yeah, that last question was more for rhetorical effect, and I can certainly see how it would be more a problem of coordination and compounded error than of individuals getting things wrong. As I said, I like all the different stuff that Word can do — but, as you point out, that massive feature-set comes at a rather steep price.
I was going to write:
but thought better of it. Besides, I use Word all the time. Last time I used TeX—OK, OK, LaTeX—was back in ’02.
I have long thought that the clever public-interest, anti-trust action the US gov’t should take would attack MSFT’s dominance in file-formats, not in operating systems. If all the info the gov’t produces directly, or pays for, or consumes, had to be in a really public file format, MSFT would have different grounds to compete on. (I think the ‘soft would still do very well in a different way; there might be wildly novel featuresets, all 95% done, if the Word coders were not tied to backwards compatibility even tighter than the rest of us are.)
Of course, in my imaginary better world, the gov’t follows this policy mostly to guarantee public and historical read-and-use access to its information. The creative-destruction benefits in the software market would be a tiny additional benefit.