On Word
PARTY’S OVER
By order of Hughes upper management, IT tightened its grip on employee software purchases. The wanton days were gone. The lush jungle of apps that thrived in my department (and others) got strip-mined down to a desolate handful of core programs everyone had to use. Microsoft This, Microsoft That, Microsoft The Other Thing. All the documents I’d so painstakingly converted to PageMaker I now had to convert back to Word. It was the standard, you see. All around me, the corporate hallways were alive with the buzzsaw chatter of IT techs bitching about all the unfamiliar, nonstandard, why-do-we-still-have-to-work-on-these-damn-Macs that stubbornly remained on some desks. Said Macs, by the way, were running 7.5 now, and adding their own cheerful reboot chimes to the freeflowing gripefest each time they bombed, which was about once every five minutes or so. I must have been restarting my 8100 a dozen times a day.
While 7.5 was busy making friends and influencing people, Apple poured vast sums of money into the bottomless pit code-named Copland, pathetically argued the merits of cooperative multitasking, and, just for good measure, trotted out their latest proprietary scheme to save the world, and presumably themselves.
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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