Re: Microsoft Word and "Smarter Than"
I think Marc Hedlund hates Word more than I do, and he's figured out the general issue that I've only mentioned examples of:
Microsoft hires very smart engineers -- I would say the smartest in the business. When they see that some number of their users have some writing problem they believe a computer could be trained to solve, they do a better job than anyone at writing the code to solve that problem. They talk all the time about "knowledge workers" and their needs. What the Word team lacks, in my view, is an awareness that, when a user is trying to get his or her own work done, the user is always smarter than the technology. Assuming that smart people aren't their market is the surest way to produce a bad word processor, which is exactly what I think they've done.
MS' Word team has decided that they know what I want, and they are really, really wrong If I could buy Word for Windows 2.0 today, I'd happily give up all the "progress" in the newer versions.
Comments
[Gordon Weakliem] August 30, 2004 23:48:04.000
Funny, Paul Graham said pretty much the same thing about programming languages.
Word for Windows 2.0
[Dave Walker] August 31, 2004 15:06:58.718
I used to support an office full of Word for Windows 2.0 users and my memory is that it crashed constantly and frequently corrupted the open document when it did so.
I told you
[Hmmm...] September 1, 2004 22:13:20.884
Unnecessary complexity artificially raises the value of small accomplishments.
For example, Word's price, therefore Microsoft's profits. It's all a rat race of unnecessarily complex features. A professor of mine taught me this lesson: if you read a paper (especially mathematics) that seems complicated to you, then you don't understand it. Only after you read it repeatedly, you may begin to feel the author was not very knowledgeable. Then, and only then, is when you REALLY understand something.
But oh my god! Profits have to increase at an exponential rate! Who the hell has time to understand shit?! No way. Everything is complex, therefore more and more valuable. Just look around - can John Doe use a computer yet? Have we had our computer revolution or not? This manufacturer induced confusion is what leads us to pay more and more, which is exactly what is necessary in this state of confusion we let ourselves be so that profits increase.
In short, this is just a tool to artificially inflate the value of something so profits also increase without actually delivering a measurable benefit to users.
And we already know what the recipe is: DO NOT BUY. But we're so fearful of the complicated beast that we're even more scared to do without it. What a sorry state of affairs. We'll see what happens when all profit finally goes to just one person without paying a single penny in salaries.