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."
Bob is a close runner-up.
It's always good to have high hopes, but in this case I'm afraid you'll have to get used to disappointment. Here we come!
My site: Free Nature Pictures
The best Microsoft employee blog is the Old New Thing. I don't think you'd get far arguing your anti-Microsoft points with Raymond.
We forgive you. We don't have type 11 errors anymore. You can come back to the Mac any time you want. *opens arms* You sound like you need a hug.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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!
MicroSoft won the Word (editor) war?
Guess we better let OpenOffice.org and Star Office know right away!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
"...functionality as embedding multimedia or animations into your documents."
So, do you have to print those out as flipbooks or what?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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!
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.
You slashdotted microsoft. Another tiny web site bites the dust. I hope you feel proud of yourselves.
...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
I still keep Word Perfect 5.1 on my 386-SX based Toshiba notebook. Notebook and word processor run just fine, and to this day would meet 99% of my needs if I didn't have to exchange documents with others (meaning they send me MSWord files).
I remember when WP succeeded because they supported a wide variety of hardware, and most every printer in existence -- unlike anyone else at the time.
And when they failed by not forseeing the quick move to MSWindows 3.0 and above.
Those were the days. What days? The days when there was still compeition in our industry.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"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.
1. Microsoft bloggers are very enthusiatic about Microsoft.
2. If you get turned down for a job at Apple you might not like the computers so much any more.
3. Asian versions of software are complicated.
4. Microsoft puts out crappy products at first and then listens to customers to improve them.
5. Other companies make mistakes and Microsoft almost always takes advantage of the situation.
6. Having a huge monopoly in operating systems and file formats gives Bill Gates a huge erection. I swear you can see it during meetings.
(Okay I made up that last one.)
The Word planning team discovered that the WordPerfect sales force was going around to customers and showing Word opening a complex WordPerfect file (printer.tst) to show how bad the conversion was, and therefore how pointless it would be to try to switch to Word. So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then).
And of course Microsoft now uses open file formats, which mean that OpenOffice can seamlessly open Word files. Microsoft would certainly never try to keep people using its products by suggesting that other products would be unable to open its files. It's features and price that sell product today, boys and girls!
I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for 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
Puh-leeze, Chris, you manage a flagship product for one of the richest monopolists in the country, one that has de facto control of the IT market, and you're afraid of emails from 13-year-old kids?
Try to at least ACT like a man.
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."
Or, to put it another way: version 1 sucks, version 2 sucks, they keep pushing on, version 3 isn't bad, 4 is better, 5 is pretty good, 6 is excellent. Of course, at that point they've improved as much as they can, things start getting clunkier and the Linux knockoff has reached the quality of version 4.
But it's a better plan than a) making something good, systematically ruining it and then suing Microsoft or b) making something that sucks, freaking out and making something else that sucks and then suing Microsoft, the two primary approaches of their competition.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
Does anyone here actually do any work or just write on Slashdot?
does that word mean what I think it means? .
.
.
S-L-A-S-H-D-O-T?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
After a year of distrusting the company somewhat, I began to gain an appreciation of how Microsoft worked, and to see it for what it was - a machine that was focused on building products that people wanted, as quickly and as well as they could. Note the "quickly" - this was what distinguished MS from Apple in the end - a focus on moving quickly, and beating the competition. 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.
I haven't read the whole thing, but I wanted to comment on this. His argument makes sense for a certain amount of time, but that time may come to a halt quickly. Microsoft's core business units (Windows and Office) are quickly becoming commodity prices. The efforts of Linux and OpenOffice are, in most respects, equaling the features found in Microsoft products. At the same time, the number any new features added often just bloat the product. When this happens, you have to start competing on quality.
Linux does this as an OS in the server room. However, as a mainstream desktop, Linux lacks in the quality department (ease of use, interface consistency). However, Windows isn't the greatest at these things either and open source should see a huge hole for stealing market share if people get behind efforts to improve the quality (UI, etc.) of the desktop product.
Apple has demonstrated the validity of the quality thinking, unfortunately they seem content to remain a niche market player. I really respect Apple for this, but would love to see Linux take a page from their quality book and read it to the mainstream.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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."
If I were still in that business I would be mining those in company blogs for the best talent. If I were Microsoft I would make those strictly available for internal use only.
True, it would be difficult to romance someone away from the biggest "bestest"; however, many of us have been trapped under an evil middle management boss at one time or another and would be willing to defect.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
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.
So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format .... but in particular their goal was to have no errors at all on printer.tst. Later the Word sales force used that same file when talking to customers as proof that Word 6.0 could open WordPerfect files flawlessly.
So what changed? Word of today does not open WordPerfect files -- hell, it doesn't even open Microsoft Works files! He seems to understand that this is a huge deal to users, but the modern Word program ignores this basic need.
For instance, I teach a class online. Part of the requirement is that students submit papers throughout the semester. Being an open minded and computer literate kinda guy, my syllabus allowed students to submit papers in any common file format.... Only to find that Word XP garbles anything that's not Word -- even other Microsoft products! Unbelievable. Fortunately, I have access to WP and OfficeStar -- but even then, opening Works files was nigh impossible until I found that one of my old laptops came pre-installed with it.
So I guess I just don't get it -- he understands the issue but ignores the solution. A perfect example of why Word is the choice we live with rather then the choice we desire.
What made Windows 3.1 successful was really two things, neither of which really involved the gee-whiz-bang GUI interface:
1: Since printer drivers were now part of the standard operating system, once a printer driver existed for Win3x, it worked for every program in Win3x. This was a huge improvement over getting the proper printer driver for your particular program.
2: At Win3.1, True Type scalable fonts were integrated into the operating system, which meant they now worked with every Win3.1 compatable program. Hard for many people to remember -- or even imagine -- days before scalable fonts were common everywhere as they are now.
The was also better memory management for extended memory.
But those two items alone are really the big deal of Win3.0/3.1 -- and they are a big deal.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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."
you've played right into their hands... things posted to the net are now considered "Microsoft Internal".
:)
!!!!
-pyrrho
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!
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.
Key points are:
- Look for major shifts in disruptive technology and be prepared to ride the wave ahead of the opponent
- GUI in this case, WP missed it and couldn't play catchup quick enough
- Don't forsake backward compatibility
- Apple did it with IIe to Mac, WordStar did it in this article. It gives people the opportunity to re-evaluate a leveled playing field when they are already pissed at you.
- If you have to play catchup, don't alienate your users with a crappy, halfbaked compromise
- Backward compatibility doesn't mean backward thinking
- Research and play on the design grievances against the current front runner
- Word was designed against WP defects
- Develop features and function against the mud slinging of the front runner
- takes the sting out of the foundation of the front runner argument
- Cross compatibility
- =backward compatibility - if the road that the fake detour sign points to looks better than the real road, it will be believed.
These are some excellent insights that GPL software designers should keep in mind. Both from the stance of priority in design and what to expect from the competition.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.
Excerpt:
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.