Slashdot Mirror
The War Of The Word
atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."
i guess it must be difficult read a blog which starts word to read any entry.
Sorry, couldn't resist ;-)
Martin
He admired Apple for its elegance and derided MS for its substandard products; he was rejected by Apple, but offered a job at MS.
Ouch.
It should be said that later, he comes to terms with MS not necessarily on the grounds that they make good product, but that they are a good business. Funny, that.
Glog!
One key point left out of the blog regarding WP's success: WP offered unlimited, toll-free technical support at the outset. It was very comforting to know that you could call someone who actually understood the program to answer a question. WP built up a lot of goodwill on that basis.
That ain't liver; that's beef kidney!
Embedding multimedia and animations into word processed documents is *simple functionality*?
When was the last time you jammed a Quicktime into your TPS cover sheet?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I can't blame him. Were I a "Mac geek" who got hired into management level by Microsoft, with all those phat stock options to look forward to, I would claim to be a newly-converted "devotee" as well.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Until printers can print animated printouts, I'll be happy with word processor programs that don't embed movies or music in documents. (in fact, after the fiasco of Clippy, I don't want ANYTHING animated in the presence of my word processor documents!)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
...not only do the completely uneducated (like myself, or slashdot) get to spout off incorrect information they heard from a friend of a guy they met somewhere but also the really bad people can blow smoke up each other's arses too...
Next thing you know, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney will have a blog about how their hearts are breaking for the poor unemployed, oppressed everyday Joe... and people will buy it because hey, it's on a blog.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
"In the period 1992-1994, Word wiped the floor with WordPerfect in reviews, winning just about all of them. "
Excuse my tinfoil hat, but wasn't that about the time that Windows finally stopped sucking utterly, and became a tool that everyone, including PHBs, could use? Isn't this the era of PC Magazine, and John Dvorak, and everyone's grandmother getting a PC?
Word was never technically superior, it merely appealed to a broader (and simpler) audience. There is a difference. Word won because it got reviews from trade rags. Word won due to a cultural shift - where document presentation became more important than its content, where a document's formatting is more important than its timely production. Word is the Guardent of word processors.
In answer to the folks who claim WP was a lousy product, I have two words: Reveal Codes.
I only jumped to Word97 from PC Word 5, then only because it was a 32bit app. By then, WP was dead and buried. I made the jump to Word2000 at work, then to OOo, which I use under the radar to publish all of my documents, typically via PDF.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I guess getting OEMs to pre-install Office and not other products can only have helped Microsoft.
I've met Chris a number of times... he's a real stand-up guy with a good head on his shoulders. If Microsoft had more like him they would probably be very successful... no, wait...
I rather like Microsoft's newfound interest in what they call "transparancy." I think that the blogging trend inside MS is a good thing-- it is surprising how little the company curtails the content on their employee's blogs.
--- JRJ
jrjBlog
Yeah, like I do that every day.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm sure more than a few of the bright employees at MS have some stories waiting to be told. OTOH, they're probably still grateful for the stock option wealth of the last 2 decades and feel some loyalty to the company that has done both good and bad.
Maybe Bob Woodward ought to interview some of them....
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yes, it is. Corel's office suite is better though. OpenOffice is the low end, but it too is good enough for most things.
Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer. It's hard to fault this logic really - it is pure efficiency from a business perspective
I'm sorry, but try as I may, you completely lost me after that comment.
Short sighted design gives M$ a bad name among developers - and by people who use computers more than the "average consumer", like say: at work.
Microsoft: Bottom line - push product - get money.
There's nothing "pure" what-so-ever about this statement. You may as well be writing about how you learned to appreciate McDonalds.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/ms_history /
Microsoft has one the word processor war, yes, there is competition, but it is not at this time a serious threat.
They have also won the browser war, yes, alternatives exist, however the majority of web users still use IE.
Just because a war is over and is won doesn't mean that there is no more room for fighting. Just look at what's still going on in Iraq.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Anyone else getting a flashback to when Microsoft was running Mac-to-Windows "switcher" stories, which turned out to be bogus pieces written by flacks in their PR department?
$5 says this "blog" is another such flake.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I think this, despite what the slashdot techy/programmer crowd may think, is spot on. MS has a reputation for rushing stuff out the door and for selling borken software, but the fact is that most of their stuff was "good enough" where it counted. Then over time they hack away and hack away until they mostly get it right. Other software companies could learn for them on this strategy although perhaps things are a bit different today.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
How about remember when EULA's didn't prohibit benchmarking under threat of well-funded legal assault?
Yes, I remember when good vendors were proud to show the world what their products could do.
How about it, Chris? We all know you're reading /. today to see how your blog is being received. You're in the inside. How about doing your part to open up benchmarking of all MS products again?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I suppose it's true. Fine.
But I gotta note that Word drives me up the g.d. fscking wall with its habit of altering formats for no apparent reason. Indentions, fonts, everything just changes at random because I press spacebar, enter, backspace or delete. Sometimes half a page of prior paragraphs will change because I pressed a button while editing an entirely different paragraph.
The damn bloody thing does not behave. I could get better cooperation from a two-year-old child. Don't you tell me I must be doing something wrong, or that I must need to get an upgrade. Bah. It's been this way for years.
MacWrite never acted like this. StarOffice neither. This has nothing to do with Linux Zealotry or Open Source Fantacism - I could care less about any of that.
Yes, Microsoft is the winner: When it comes to pure teeth-splintering, hair-shredding frustration, Microsoft, congratulations, you've got 'em all beat, and you probably always will.
Bastards.
If you write a GUI OS and don't give developers from competing companies any info about the OS you get to market first, and win.
Anyone remember Sprint by Borland? Of course you don't.
It's also the reason Access took over and not Paradox.
oh... It had more than a little to do with why no one uses Quattro by Borland also.
Borland's first line of Windows versions of their software had to be developed with VERY little knowledge of the Windows API.
It's funny that he doesn't mention any of the lawsuit wars that went on between MS and Borland when Windows first came out.
They sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their products... and won.
Sounds like MS would rather have a half-baked product now than a great one later (or maybe ever). Nice. It does totally ring with the sense of their products in my experience, be they Mac or WIn platforms. They have to understand that they see things from the perspective of those who have been working with incremental versions of their stuff for so long - and you get this sense from the minutia in the blog - that they have no sense of an outsider, pulling up to a computer that they just unwrapped, and trying to get some plain old writing done by using Word. It's like being dropped into the cockpit of a plane and being told to drive. It does dozens of non-intuitive things before you even get to the annoying parts, and it's ALL design. They know this. Every so often that ship something that makes good design sense and does breakthru stuff - but mostly their work is fraught with details that get in the way rather than accellerate your work.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Mod Doesn't understand sarcasm -1
Excellent question. Maybe I've got my tinfoil hat on too tight, but I wouldn't put it past Microsoft's management to have a plan akin to this: "Hey, go out and make Microsoft look good. Speak as individuals. Tell the world that we're really NOT the Evil Empire."
Microsoft has tried to manipulate public opinion of them before. Maybe they're just getting more subtle. When the big money doesn't work, go soft-touch.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This is a very good article by an insider. It is probably a bit biased but, nevertheless, is well worth reading. One of the main points that one would understand is how strong Microsoft marketing is.
Half of software is marketing; half is engineering. Too bad some people still haven't realized it....
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
And at Version 7 we change the entire file structure to demolish the compeition and force a new upgrade cycle, after seeding the CIO with a free copy.
You'd better bet the whole company will upgrade after said CIO finds out no one else in the company can open his memos saved in the new default format.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I quote the article, as the author describes his... ...fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect - since they often are implicitly about me and therefore I for one know them to be incorrect). But enough about that - let's just dive in and see what happens. Hopefully the net-dwelling paranoid delusional conspiracy theorists won't descend upon me... :-)
With respect, there are certainly plenty of lower-than-the-common-denominator internet users willing to throw an egg for no particularly good reason, but this writer is strikingly dishonest in his defense of his employer.
Microsoft is a monopolist who has profited tremendously from shipping user-antaganostic code under cover of standards-lock-in. This is hardly an "outrageous" accusation; rather, it's been established in the courts, but far more, it's common knowledge and indeed, a running joke.
The company's story is interesting because, when they see their monopoly threatened, they are capable of rising to the occasion and doing good work. But they are a classic victim of their success, indeed, at many times a classic monopolist, and they often have acted it. When there was no incentive for them to do a good job, they did a terrible one, smirking all the way to the bank.
And they are crystal clear in their mission - not to "provide better products faster" or whatever the PR materials say this week, but to enrich themselves. And if there is a choice between enriching themselves and providing better software faster, they make the "right" choice every time. But should Chris suggest I am a "thug" for saying so, I hope he will include the U.S. Department of Justice - who advanced the same idea, and prevailed in court.
Chris wants to breathlessly paint his company's critics with the straw-man tar brush - as he does so, he is being dishonest.
I did find his writing on his work to be fascinating, and I'd say he expresses himself well, and it's no surprise he's found the success he has within the company. But he curiously glosses over the role that OEM bundling played in the success of the Office franchise.
You see, as Microsoft sat on the backs of the computer manufacturers and twisted arms, it had an excellent position to "entice" bundling deals that would choke off a 3rd party software market like, say, office softawre, by making sure that their own products were conveniently already included on new computers for a reasonable price.
This is hardly as clear cut as what they did to control the browser or media player landscape, but does anyone (outside of a Microsoft manager with a certain proprietary interest in it being more about his own skill) have the audacity to suggest Word won the format war purely on its merits?
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Or, to sum up what you just said:
You switched back to Office because that's what you wanted in the first place?
You just "evaluated" Open Office based on the fact that you wanted to use Microsoft Office all along.... that's just wierd. It's not a load of frustration, you guys just weren't smart enough to evaluate your needs before you decided on your tool, that's all. You can't blame OOo for the fact that it's not Office. That's like blaming a Lincoln Continental for not being a Corvette. You can't just compare two things that happen to be in the same general category but do different things and then blame one of them for not being the other just because you didn't pick the one you really wanted to begin with.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Really? Please please please show me the documentation or press releases or ANTYHING other than the typical slashdot "out of the ass, but since it's anti-ms it MUST be correct fact" where a new release version of windows broke the lastest version of word perfect.
Please.
WordPerfect lost it as much as Word gained it.
WordPerfect Corporation vs Microsoft Corporation
1) WP - promote senior assembly programmers as the new Windows programmers, MS - hire new graduates and put them to work under former assembly programmers.
2) WP - lights out at 5pm, MS - burn the midnight oil.
3) WP - bet the farm on OS/2, MS - bet the farm on Windows while paying lip service to OS/2.
4) WP - try to compete with traditional strengths, MS - Work with IBM to create a CUA, then change the CUA once everyone else adopts it.
5) WP - hated MS so much that they used Borland OWL, MS - made the compiler, made the dlls and APIs, didn't tell anyone about it if they could have an advantage for awhile.
6) WP - had incompetent management promoted from within including rampant nepotism, MS - hired management from outside, promoted from within when it identified talent.
The list goes on and on...
Huh? Ok, I read a good bit of his blog for the current month, and looked at the titles for March, and I have found absolutely nothing to link his blog to what you said.
That is, I don't get it. What are you talking about?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It's pretty much the exact same Clippy joke posted to the last OOo article, and it's the same Clippy joke that appears every single time someone mentions word, and Clippy hasn't been on by default since the release of XP over three years ago, and he's easily hidable with a right-click, but hey he's funny and he gives upmods! Mention Clippy!!
It should be said that later, he comes to terms with MS not necessarily on the grounds that they make good product, but that they are a good business. Funny, that.
Kinda like how we come to terms with OSS not necessarily on the grounds that it makes good product, but that it's an idealistic philosophy. Funny that.
They got left behind with the transition to 32bit programs. WP 6.1 was slow to launch and the Office 95 was easy to pirate. It was actually interesting to watch. One person in an office would get Office 95 and then suddenly that same version would end up on every machine. Then companies starting getting on the Net. Suddenly Word .doc files were being emailed around and now needed to be read by companies not using Word. The need to read .doc files because narrow-minded business parters refused to use anything else really sealed WP's fate. Then...well you know the rest of the story. As much as I like to hype OpenOffice.org, no way Microsoft is going to let history repeat itself in the business world. They'll give Office away for Free before they let cede the Fortune 1000 market to someone else.
Also contrary to this guys take it was NEVER about quality. If it was Word Perfect would have won out.
btw I'd still rather use WP 6.1 over any version of Word even today. Word is infuriating to work with as it constantly has to do things "its way". I just recently was updating my resume which hasn't been touched in years and the act of just adding a simple bullet point in line with the others made me want to smash my head into my monitor.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Nope. Support calls didn't eat into thier bottom line in time. What killed them was their refusal to make a Windows version of WP. And when they did finally release the windows version, WP 5.2 for Windows, it was complete shit. Among the many problems with it was their abject refusal to let Windows handle the printer. They had built such a reputation for outstanding printer support in the DOS world that they could not concieve of the idea that Windows could run the printer. Add to that a broken file export system and a horrible user interface and it was all over for WordPerfect.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS is still the best CUI based word processing program ever made. But they completely fucked themselves over with Windows.
WordPerfect Corp. lived in denial, claiming that their loyal customers would stick with them in the DOS world and not migrate to Windows. They didn't even think about making a Windows version until MS Word was eating their testicles.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Except that you still didn't prove that a new version of Windows broke the latest version of WordPerfect.
We know there were undocumented Windows APIs. That wasn't the question.
- Microsoft (not Dell, no) decided to bundle an application that did not work with the OS they were shipping with the box.
- All the Corel applications I've ever used in Windows run fine. But of course when it comes to "WP Lite" Corel somehow ran into the problem with the "hidden APIs" and "WP Lite" was diabolically disabled.
So this is your evidence that Microsoft deliberately "broke" WP. Correct?His argument is that Microsoft Word won because it was the "best" word processor because Microsoft has listened so carefully to its customers. There are several things wrong with that argument.
First, it is naive to think that there is a single "best" piece of software for everybody. Is there a single "best" car? A single "best" phone company? A single "best" suit of clothes? A single best food? They tried the one-size-fits-all in the planned economies of Russia and China, and you know how well that worked. It seems naive to think that there is any single word processor that works well for 90% of the people.
Second, the quality differences are irrelevant to most people. Lotus Smartsuite, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc. were almost certainly all good enough for at least 90% of all users. But the fact is that no amount of lowering the prices of those other products made them competitive.
Today, people buy Microsoft Word even though they can get OpenOffice for free. Why? It's not because Microsoft Word has more buttons or more features, it is because the only way people can be sure that they can read Microsoft Word documents is by buying Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word may also happen to be a well-engineered word processor, but the need to read Word's proprietary format was the thing that assured Microsoft Word adoption half a dozen years ago, and it still is.
It is also hard to believe now, but all the pundits in the industry thought GUI interfaces with windows and dialog boxes and menus and mice (the Mac, Windows 2.0, etc.) were for novices and were basically toys, since they lacked the power of a command line interface.
Is it that hard to believe? Let's look at the Windows user base. The majority of the users are novices. MS markets their product to novices and people with business clout more than any other subgroups.
So how does he acertain that GUIs are indeed for power users? That's evidently what he's implying. Sounds like he's been thoroughly indoctrinated: it'd take roughly a year, I s'pose, to be brainwashed in an environment where you spend all your time, even if you're zealotous about your opposing stance - as he was.
Personally, I always get frustrated when I have to use a Windows machine. I used to think that Windows Explorer was an elegant and simplistic file manager, and I wanted something like it for Linux. Then I learned how to more effectively use BASH; I learned regexes, BASH scripting, and other such things that relate to CLI. And now? I'm constantly wishing for regexes in Windows when searching for files, listing files, or what have you. Yet there's no such functionality.
Even something as simple as file management is very un-powerful in Windows. It pisses me off thta he's got the gall to make such statements. Maybe he simply doesn't know?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I wonder which company is jealously guarding their file formats now... I wonder how MS Word would have grown if the DMCA existed then.
I personally like Robert Scoble's blog. Sure, he loves Microsoft, but he understand that there are some advantages to using Linux or Mac systems.
For OpenOffice.org to achieve widespread adoption, this is something we need to start doing.
We need to take the most fucked-up Word
There should be an OOo team dedicated to just this.
In fact, if I were in charge of the OOo 2.0 project, I'd put the bulk of my resources into it, and make everything else secondary.
A secondary group will be feature-tracking. If Office has a feature, OOo is going to have it. It doesn't have to be easier to use; most of Office's features are difficult to use as it is.
Once people are using OOo as much or more than Office, then you can start futzing with aesthetic concerns, code beautification, and other issues you like.
I understand Microsoft itself works something like this. Of course, that's the real reason they dominate the market, more than anything else!
Clippy!
Much as I dislike alot of microsoft stuff, this is just over the top. There are two software areas that microsoft does fairly well - Office apps and RAD development (as opposed to high end server development enviroments).
My biggest gripe with microsoft is the abuse of monopoly powers - the fact that you cant for love nor money get office for linux (except via third party stuff like Wine projects). Thats abuse of a monopoly position of operating systems.
Office is, however, a reasonable suite. Its not the best at everything by any means, but you would be an idiot to suggest its the worst. In fact, some of the user interface stuff in office was genuinely innovative - like the background spell check with squiggly lines under misspelt words. Word 95 was the first to do this from memory, and certainly the first major word processor that could.
The killer app that microsoft makes is not windows, its office. And its with a good reason - its actually very good software. The number of people who run it under wine on linux or on OSX is a strong statement of its quality. If its an undocumented standard for file formats, well, thats because storing documents in HTML and then XML came way later than microsoft's office suite. It doesn't mean that its time to move to better standards for document storage, but at the time microsoft developed this software (Ie., in the days of word 3.0 onwards) pretty much nobody stored documents in XML (for space reasons alone - Hard drive capacities of 20-40 Megabytes were common).
Just my 2c worth, will be considered flamebait by some no doubt.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
" you need a word processor that reads and writes Office document format PERFECTLY."
Congratulations. You are now vendor locked. You may no longer choose to use other products that may have better/different features or cost less.
Have nice day and please continue to deposit money into our accounts on a regular basis.
Thank you
Management at MS.
evil is as evil does
$300K. Wow. Thats an astounding chunk of change. Let's see now, the LA Unified School District's 2003 budget was $403 million dollars (out of just under $5 billion in revenue), while Microsoft's total revenue figures for the same year were $32 billion dollars.
Even ignoring (for your argument's sake) that it's legal to pirate and steal commercial software, and even assuming that the school district indeed paid $5M (which is not true), $300K is equal to 4 hours of budget expenditures by the district and 1/29th of a day's revenue for Microsoft. So I have trouble reconciling this with your claim that "Microsoft is stealing from children", as if some kids in San Mateo were denied their lunch so Microsoft could pad their books.
BTW, just in case you fail to read the BSA press release, here's a relevant quote:
I suggest you send a nastygram to all these companies for their part in the "extortion" of "cash-strapped" schools.Thanks for the opening, I love looking up links like these.
Want some more, bugni man?
It's Bungi, please. And yes, sure. Hit me again.
That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record
I think we've taken care of the "cash strapped" part. That you consider "M$ Word" to be "stupid" is another matter, and I don't see how enforcement of a license is "shameful" or "bullying", except from your peculiar point of view. I suppose you also believe that "sharing" copyrighted music is A-OK. Do you regularly shoplift at Wal-Mart as well?
Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached
Of course it doesn't! That's why the LA School District dumped "M$" and went to Free Software in 1998, right? They did that, right? I mean, since "M$" "bullied them" to the tune of "$5M" and essentially bankrupted them, they must have dumped "Windoze" and gone to Debian. In 1998. Right?
I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.
No, not bothered. Merely amused. Entertained at seeing you trip all over your bogus arguments, certainly.