Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Rick Schaut rises to answer him. Now Rick’s a good guy, and sincere, but I suspect he knows in his heart of hearts just how right John Welch is. Still, Word is his project, and I’m sure he loves it, and we all want to defend our babies. (My apologies to Rick for misspelling his name in the first iteration of this article.)

I certainly think no less of him for his attempt, but he glosses over most of the points Welch makes, and limits himself to defending against the easier ones. I remember well the pain engendered by moving a reasonably complex document from MacWord to WinWord and back, from Welch’s post it’s apparent this hasn’t changed much, and from Shaut’s silence on those issues, I suspect it never will.

Welch’s list of problems includes incompatibility with a laundry list of Microsoft technologies, Shaut focuses on IRM, and blames the problem on Apple for not having such a system built into the OS. It’s a valid point, though still arguable, as Welch’s comment was about Word’s interaction with IRM on a MS server and it’s a fair question to ask why Apple should concern itself with facilitating MS software to talk to MS servers.

But I can be gracious and yield the point to Shaut entirely, and still Welch’s complaint will stand. I’d even add something obvious. I can’t believe MS is committed to MacOffice until I see similar capabilities shipping in both versions of Office Professional. Windows version ships a page layout app; Mac version, well, sorry about that. LiveMeeting, Sharepoint, Content Management, all those are pure MS plays that MacOffice can’t use.

As an outsider, the only conclusion I can draw is the one I drew all those years ago. MS doesn’t want me to use its software in a diverse environment. It wants me to be either all Mac or all Windows, and doesn’t want me to mix platforms. Since I’ve always been a firm believer that people should use the tool that best fits their hand, that point of view doesn’t cut it with me.

I’m open to evidence on this point, though. Show me any meaningful effort MS has made to create diversity and I’ll listen. Publishing APIs doesn’t count, though. I want to see actual effort expended; Welch mentioned Services for Macintosh, which is so badly decayed you can smell it even outside of the server room; if you want to connect Macs and PCs, you certainly can’t use anything from MS to do it. You have to use products from Apple or Thursby. The MS attitude seems to be, “You have to spend time, money and effort to talk to us; we won’t spend anything to talk to you.”

And as along as that attitude prevails, I can’t be a MS customer.

Have in front of me Creative Computing’s guide to Dreamweaver. Someday, perhaps, I’m going to read it. Not because someday I’m going to use Dreamweaver; I own a copy of it now and work with it on an occasional basis. I bought the book in a hurry one day because I’d expected to use the tutorials, etc., in it to improve my techniques.

No, it’s not because it’s not timely, or because I don’t have the time; it’s because it’s too diificult for me to read. Not badly written, but badly designed: a mixture of what appears to be 7 and 9 point type on varying background colors. In other words, it’s laid out with no thought whatever given to who might be reading it.

This is a common enough problem. At a recent WorldCon, George Scithers was telling me about the magazine designer that was called in to handle the redesign of the science fuction magazine he edited. The first design sample had colored text in tiny print, low-contrast type on busy backgrounds. Luckily enough, George had some measure of control, and the young genius’s design never saw print.

Just as writers write for themselves, most designer’s first impulse is to design for themselves. But what works for a writer is a major flaw in a designer.
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