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Friday, September 10, 2004
Word down 
| | Microsoft will spend 2005 and 2006 competing against itself with what will likely be a free downloadable (a la XP SP2) pruned version of Avalon and Indigo while delaying a competitive response to the Google-led hosted alternative to the Office "information management shell" to 2007 and potentially beyond. No wonder Allchin asks: "Does that make sense?" If Longhorn, the latest incarnation of Allchin's 1995 Cairo unification of Windows and SQL Server, slips again, he may not be around for the answer. |
| | I'm not so sure about that last item. Jim Allchin has proven to be a mighty durable executive. The whole thing strikes me as a call for constuctive adaptation by Microsoft. |
| | In a not entirely unrelated matter, my wife spent most of last night struggling with a Word document that had been authored by a number of people, each of whom had contributed their own formatting changes to various parts of the thing. The nested conditionalities embodied in each little gray paragraph symbol were baffling in the extreme. That wasn't all, but I won't bore you with the rest of it. If you've used Word, you've been there. The last news is that Word crashed on her machine. Meanwhile, I've spent at least two of my own hours trying to help, attempting to overcome the general mix of ignorance and annoyance that I've felt toward Word since it appeared two decades ago. I avoid it for all but cases where it's an absolute necessity. For many other people, however, Word is utterly unavoidable. It's the universal word processor. The fact that it's lame and strange and in some ways incomprehensible to many (most?) of its users has had no market effect, because no comparable alternatives have survived in the market. |
| | This, by the way, is far more annoying to me than the ubiquitous Windows francise. As the Net becomes The Platform for most of what we do, Windows becomes just another way to operate Net- or Web-based apps and services on that platform. But Word isn't a Net- or a Web-based app. It's an app that keeps its users in the competition-proof Microsoft silo. That it bridges two hardware platforms doesn't make it any less restrictive. It remains, for most people, a non-substitutable product. |
| | OpenOffice is getting closer all the time, however. I'm looking forward to the day when it offers the same degree of improvement over Word as Firefox does over Internet Explorer. |
| | Of the Linux vendors, the company with the least stake in Linux and the worst consumer relations group has given more to the GNU/Linux community--Sun. Few of us doubt that a Linux desktop would exist if Sun had not bought, paid for and given StarOffice to the community. |
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