I told my wife that Word sucked every bit as much as WordPerfect, just differently. She's been using the product for a few months now, and is every bit as pleased with it as she is with Outlook - and bear in mind, her point of comparison is with the default "productivity" apps that Sun ships on their Unix workstations (or more precisely, the ones they shipped 2-3 years ago).

A rather low bar, and Word consistently manages to not make it. Last night, she was putting together a checklist of items for a girl scout event - she's one of a group of Mom's helping co-run my daughter's girl scout troop this year. It's not a complex checklist - some text, a few bullets, more text, a few more bullets. After I got past the swearing, she told me that Word was an AD product (as opposed to AI).

What's that mean? Artificial Dominatrix. It puts the bullets where it thinks they belong, and if you try to argue with it, you will be punished. The Word team at MS needs to be taken out behind the woodshed, and beaten severely with the cluestick. The menus/toolbars/ribbon area is so not the problem. The basic "I'll guess what you are trying to do and then preempt you" behavior is.

I have somewhat fond memories of Word for Windows 2.0. Each release since then has sucked more and more - and sadly, tools like WordPerfect and OpenOffice have seen the suckage and copied it.