On Word
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STORM WARNING
Sometime in 1994 I saw an article in MacWeek headlined “Microsoft’s New Windows Threat,” that was all about the next version of Windows. It was code-named “Chicago” and was already generating a lot of buzz. I saw the screenshots and was siezed horror and outrage. Horror because they looked so much like the Mac (but still cheesier), and outrage because … well, for the same reason. Could they do that? How could they do that? Oh sure, they called it the Recycle Bin instead of the Trash, and the computer icons ran down the left side of the screen instead of the right. But who did that bastard Gates think he was fooling?
Well, the starry-eyed beta testers for one. “Windows is great!” they gushed. “It’s just like the Mac!” they exclaimed. “It’s better than the Mac!” they raved. From there it was but a short leap to “The Mac’s on the way out …” and “The Mac is dead …” – a refrain that would shortly come into wide use in computing circles.
Overnight my opinion of Microsoft flashed over into hatred. They passed IBM as Enemy #1 (with Apple’s incompetent upper management coming in a close second). That I had to use Microsoft’s products every day just added to the affront.
I started seeing stories – not just in the Mac press now but in the general media – that told of companies dumping their Macs and replacing them with Windows boxes. More and more I began to notice the IT guys at my office bitching about Macs – too expensive, too slow, too hard to fix, too not standard.
The trickle became a river. The river became a flood. A growing wave of companies were going PC. Corporate America was ditching the Mac. Apple’s marketshare, long stalled in the low to mid-teens, began to fall.
MAN THE BARRICADES
I vowed action. I didn’t move to a shack in Montana to write my manifesto or anything, but I did man the metaphorical barricades in defense of Macdom. I joined The Resistance. It soon occupied a sizable portion of my waking life. Before long I was exhibiting many of the classic symptoms of borderline clinical Mac zealotry.
ANDY: “Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m a Mac-aholic …”
GROUP: “Hi Andy …”
I haunted the OS advocacy newsgroups and flamed ignorant PC users (was there any other kind?), I subscribed to Guy Kawasaki’s EvangeList, and made myself the bane of PC-pushing salesmen at the local Circuit City and CompUSA stores. I rebooted the hung and frozen Macs in the dusty, neglected corners of these stores and gave their hard drives pithy, pro-Mac names.
At work, I fought back as best I could in my pitiable flyspeck way. I switched all the division instructional documents I controled over to PageMaker (it still astounds me that I had the freedom to do that at a major U.S. corporation). For presentations, I used Aldus Persuasion (a truly superior product, may it rest in peace – it did multiple masters in a document ten years before PowerPoint, and implemented them better). For org charts and the like I used FreeHand.
I bought Macs for my mom and brother. Could I afford to? (I refuse to dignify that question with an answer, sir.) Suffice it to say it was worth going into debt and paying interest rates in the high teens and low twenties to a) bring my family into the technological mainstream, and, b) keep them away from PCs. I think I dropped almost two grand at CompUSA for mom’s new Performa, and almost $700 for an old LC all-in-one for my brother.
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Sooooo Microsoft pumped the Mac community with buggy software to help push them to Windows? I thought Microsoft just produced buggy software as a whole.
But if you think about it, it’s the same type of reason the ROKR ended up allowing only 100 songs.
Microsoft cheats Apple by producing a lower quality word processor for the Mac. (Hey! I’m switching to Windows because it has a better word processor.)
Apple cheats Motorola by forcing Moto to product a lower quality music player. (I’m switching to an iPod for my music.)
But that’s just my 2 cents.
Wow. I would be amazed if I could write more than 50 or so words about my first experience with Microsoft Word.
Basically I was using a Performa 600CD years after it should have been retired (the PowerMac 8600/300 and 9600/300 had just been shipped and a friend who got one gave me the Performa) and I was searching desperately for a decent word processor that would run fast enough to keep up with my ability to type 20 or so words per minute (of which basically none were able to do on this slow machine, I would probably kill it with my current typing speed). Word was one of the applications I tried version 5 or 6 not really sure which. It sucked so bad that I ended up using Aldus Pagemaker 4.0 instead. A few months later Corel released the old 68k version of WordPerfect for free and I switched to it. Didn’t use Word again until I started using it at college with whatever they had installed on Windows in 1999. Unfortunately now I use the damn thing almost daily. Won’t even go into how annoyed I get with the PC version because most of the problems are platform wise not application (like the way it selects the whole word when you click instead of setting the insertion point). My main compliant about the Mac version is just how bloated and slow it can be at times.
Okay so I can write more than 50 words about Word.
MacTel boxen are NOT blazingly fast. They’re, hmmm, G4-class speed – a G5 turns ‘em into fine-grained dust whenever you see them side to side, I’m told.
Word 6 was the way it was because of a decision at Microsoft to single source the Mac and PC versions of Office. The idea was that they could save having to port features back and forth.
However, whenever you do this to a graphical app, you end up having two layers to deal with: a toolkit layer and an app layer. It takes longer to get anything accomplished and requires some dicipline to maintain such a scheme. Therefore, it gets to be a political problem.
The Windows guys eventually ditched the codebase for Office for Windows and struck out on their own. This left the Mac group with what was essentially a Windows codebase to produce a Macintosh product. They have been fighting that battle ever since at the Mac Business Unit of Microsoft.
And I’ve seen the codebase – around 1999. It had lots of pre-processor in it. They were working on Carbonizing the “toolkit” layer which essentially implemented Windows API calls on the Macintosh.
If you ever wonder why Office for Mac isn’t as nice, quick, responsive, etc as a program like say… OmniGraffle, that’s why.
Help me PLEASE… i’ve got microsoft word for my ibook with tiger on. But i have this realy annoying thing that i can’t send any word doc through email, aparently they have a virus on, but i’m told tiger can’t have virus’, this is doing my head in. if anyone can help me that would be greatly apreciated.
thanks