Chris Pratley on Word
Chris Pratley, the Program Management manager for Word (amongst other things) discusses Word and its movement from "worst to first" in market share. It's an interesting read, and explains one thing very clearly (at least to me) - Word was a far, far better product back when it had meaningful competition. At this point, Word's developers have utterly forgotten what end users want, and it shows. What do I mean? Well, here's my list of irritations with Word - none of them utterly crippling, but the collection would make me switch products in a heartbeat if a decent competitor existed. Word Perfect isn't it, because it mostly stinks in the same ways (my Wife uses it).
It didn't used to be this way - I recall liking Word for Windows 2.0. It stayed out of my way, and did what I wanted. The current product mostly gets in my way, and does things I dislike:
- Bullets and Numbering - yes, I've mentioned this before. However, I shouldn't have to use copy/paste to ensure that a bullet goes where I want it. This part of Word is just broken
- Those adjusting menus - they drive me nuts, because all my learned behavior from older versions of Word is shot. When I pull a menu, the items aren't where I expect them - and often aren't there at all until I pull the whole menu. It ought to be easy to turn this off - but the options don't look obvious to me
- The HTML export - the HTML created is a mess. Does no one in Redmond actually know HTML? Based on Word, my guess would be "no".
Doesn't look like a long list, does it? It's not - but the mess with bullets ticks me off every time I use the product. It's a constant, low level irritation, just like the menu thing. The irritation is exacerbated by the knowledge that this stuff used to work - I know that I did not have to fight bullet lists every step of the way in WfW 2.0. It's been a downhill slide since 2.0, as far as I'm concerned - regardless of what the reviewers have said...
Comments
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[Chris Pratley] April 27, 2004 9:52:57.854
James, I could reply at length on why the product is what it is now, and why I beleive it is a better product now, but I'll just respond to your comments. 1. Bullets and numbering. Agree - this was a misguided attempt in 1997 to make this activity easier based on looking at the trouble people (true novices) seemed to have using the feature. We're looking at ways to address it. We all make mistakes. 2. Menus. Another attempt to respond to people, this time saying the product had "too many features I don't use". The thinking here was if you get through the first few weeks training the menus, then you have short menus that have the features you want on them. I was not in favor of this personally, but the UI team felt that they had good data to justify it, and certainly there were enough people complaining about it. You can turn this off by checking on Tools/Customize/Options/Always show full menus. 3. The HTML Word creates is designed to "round trip" everything in a Word document while still being able to view it wysiwyg in netscape and IE 3.x or higher and still open it again and edit it as if it was still a *.doc file. It was never designed to be a minimalist HTML production tool - please use another tool for that. Many customers (in workgroups) find this HTML support useful, because they can save all their docs as HTML to their intranet or Sharepoint server, so others can view them in a browser and they can still go back & open them directly off the web, and update them in Word with no data loss. They don't even realize they are actually editing web pages. BTW, in response to requests, we added in Word2002 an option for "filtered" HTML, which removes much of the data Word needs to be able to re-open the file without data loss, but the display in the browser is not affected. Try it out.
A decent competitor DOES exist
[Thomas Muders] April 27, 2004 11:07:51.447
I am surprised that you say that you would switch if a decent competitor existed. At least one exists: OpenOffice.org. Word Perfect sucks indeed. In a recent test in the german computer magazine c't (they have also a smalltalk tutorial now :-) ) it was stated that all of the major software vendors' word processors suck. OpenOffice.org though turned out to be a good product. The only thing which annoys me about it is that the startup time is rather long. There were also several smaller products which were better than word (according to their criteria), for example TextMaker (www.softmaker.com) -thm
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[Joku] April 28, 2004 3:10:21.612
I agree with every point you make. And about the HTML "roundtrip editing", I see no technical reasons for designing it like it is (Could be I am dumb?). The "master data" could have been just kept in a .doc and then have a renderer for html 4, xhtml etc. Upon opening the "master" there would be a parser which travels the html's for differences. It would probably break should too big changes be made into the html's using 3rd party editor, but nothing's perfect. About listening to "too novice users", these users (even the grandpa's etc) won't be total novices for too long, but hiding some obviously useful commands / changing their place around (Personalized menus) is just dumb, mildly put, as it sure doesn't help to learn the places for the commands any faster then everything changes depending what/whose computer your on. In public places like schools you can find every computer with their personalized places for Word commands and what not. I'm sure novice users like learning the new locations everytime. Time to do something, bit of common sense perhaps?