On Word
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A BOVINE ABOMINATION
AKA Word 6.0. It had more business floating over a Macy’s parade than taking up space on a hard drive. Continents drifted faster than it launched. Its new look (identical on both platforms for the first time) was aggressively gray – it had all the charm of an urban flood channel. By then I was personally so convinced of Microsoft’s malign intentions toward the Mac that it was a surprise to me when 6.01 came out and solved the boot speed problem – something to do with font loading if I recall correctly.
Maybe now’s a good time to step back and take a deep breath.
Why all the hyperventilating Andy? What difference did it ever make whether the letters and reports I did were done with Word or some other app? Or on the Windows version of Word rather than the Mac version? I had, by the mid-90s, seen how much more quickly Word for Windows launched; how much more snappily the font menus dropped down, and how inhumanly fast Word could scroll through page after page of saturated text in a big file. I’d always seen this as further proof of Microsoft’s villainy. They hobbled the Mac version of Word as just another way to pry users away from Apple.
Now I wonder. The G5 front-side bus made a big difference in the Mac’s speed with lots of programs, including the Office suite. The Mac OS has always had more eye-candy than Windows. Now that Apple’s made the jump to Intel, I hear the developer Mactels are blazing fast. These are legitimate non-Microsoft explanations for the Mac’s relative lack of performance. How much of my anger at Microsoft was misdirected? And besides – the Mac’s just a tool, isn’t it?
Yes, it is. But oh, what a tool. Mac users often use the word “love” when they talk about their machines. It’s a common phenomenon in the Mac community. You don’t find its equivalent on the Windows side much. Windows has never been a very lovable OS and neither is the hardware it runs on. Which is not to say that many Windows users don’t have intense feelings about their platform. On the contrary.
THE HERD
PC users like to rib their Mac brethren for being too touchy-feely about their machines. They like to hold themselves up as exemplars of rationality. But I can think of few better examples of unreason than the commercial stampede to Windows that brought Microsoft its monopoly ten years ago.
How much of that PC buying came after thoughtful consideration of system features, strengths, and weaknesses? And how much of it came about because of the sheer brute logic – if you can call it that – of the herd? It’s easy to buy based on popularity. We all do it sometimes. No need to compare and contrast things in detail, no need to exert mental energy deciding what matters to you and what doesn’t. Much easier simply to do what everyone is doing.
What would happen if you took a group of people who’d just bought Windows 95 and asked them why they did it. How many of them would give you some version of “everyone’s doing it”? (Variants: “It’s a Windows world,” “It’s the standard,” and “Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.”)
The herd mindset is attractive because it makes no demands. Do what the herd does, buy what the herd buys, think what the herd thinks, and reap the benefits of primordial validation: a good feeling in your gut (synonyms: safety, security). Ask 100 people in any herd why they’re there, and they point to others nearby: “Because they’re here.” Go to those others, ask them the same question, get the same answer. Multiply that exponentially and you get a sense of the tremendous self-reinforcing, self-replicating energy that generates and sustains a herd. At a certain point, groups reach critical mass, grow explosively and become herds. That’s what happened with Microsoft Windows. And Word, and all the other Office apps in the mid 90s.
Meanwhile, consternation swept the Mac universe, where the herd phenomenon was also at work, only in reverse. I don’t think I saw one article about Apple – outside of those written in the Mac press – that didn’t use the word “beleaguered.” Journalists probably had a macro for it. (A Word macro. :-) )
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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