Charlie Stross: Why Microsoft Word Must Die 479
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Rapture of the Nerds co-author Charlie Stross hates Microsoft Word, worse than you do. Best of all, he can articulate the many structural faults of Word that make his loathing both understandable and contagious. 'Steve Jobs approached Bill Gates... to organize the first true WYSIWYG word processor for a personal computer -- ...should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible... Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset — and it only got worse from there.' Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model? Does document formatting even matter this much, versus content?"
Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:3, Insightful)
enough said!
Re:Yes... and no. (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it's an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job.
So his publisher is forcing him to use Word. I would be annoyed as well. I know at least some publishers accept PDF (and some even LaTeX). So maybe he should just choose a different publisher.
ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, let's enumerate all the structural untidinesses of Word. Let's blame that application -- which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp) but because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do -- for the inelegance of its data model. Let's compare it to SGML, which is so much nicer and easier and so much more elegant if you're a programmer and can appreciate that sort of elegance, and if you're not a programmer, well then for god's sake why are you touching a computer?
If you want SGML, you know where to download it.
Free software probably can't do better (Score:2, Insightful)
because Word is the quintessential example an app where you need a large paid development staff with varying skill sets, including many (UI design, usability, localization, QA, end user support, documentation, incorporating specialized features for customers such as law firms, integration with legacy enterprise software...) which historically have not been the strengths of FOSS.
And here's something that's often overlooked: even if FOSS could put together a team to do this (perhaps with some resources loaned by IBM or Red Hat or someone else), it's not enough to do it once. Or twice. The software has to be maintained year after year and upgraded to reflect the ever-changing requirements of businesses and consumers, and people expect professional UI design, usability, localization, QA, and doc.
Ref. Fred Brooks' article about the difference between the level of effort required to produce a "neat little tool" vs. a commercial product. Brooks came up with a factor of 9, and it wasn't just about having more folks involved... it was different kinds of folks too.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Insightful)
Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Joel Spolsky has an excellent write up on why the Office file formats suck. A must read.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html [joelonsoftware.com]
He actually worked on Excel leading to funny anecdotes like this one
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html [joelonsoftware.com]
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishers sometimes will accept camera-ready PDF, but that's a _lot_ of work, and in the age of digital publishing, a complete non-starter, because PDF is more like paper than text. Submitting in MS Word is much easier. It's a royal pain in the ass, especially since the MS Word document is essentially a consumable, and is thrown away as soon as the publisher goes to typesetting. It means that page proof edits have to be done by hand, and that second editions often don't capture all the page proof corrections, because those corrections never go into the word document unless the author does it, but that's also time consuming, because the author has to not only incorporate the page proof edits, but all of the copyedits as well.
The whole thing is a monumental waste of everybody's time—if it were possible to do all the edits to the same document, throughout the life of the book, it would be much more efficient. Style-sheet-oriented HTML is actually a better choice than Word, but nobody uses it because there isn't a good HTML editor that does change control.
Ob WP Post (Score:5, Insightful)
Three words: Reveal, Codes, and Acerson.
With just those you could do damned near anything.
To this day, likely close to ten years since I stopped using WordPerfect, I still find myself clobbered by strange MS Word formatting edicts, with no obvious way to get rid of them.
At least with WP you could see why something was weird, and fix it.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:4, Insightful)
Most major publishers want to format it themselves. They've got professionals for that, and software designed for page layout. (NOT Microsoft Word.)
The effort you put into formatting it is a waste. Let the pros do what they do best. You do what you do best, generate the content.
The real issue here isn't the publishers, but businesses of all sorts, wherever documents are passed around for editing by multiple people. It would be great if those processes could avoid formatting issues, at least until the content is set, but they rarely do. So they need a format that everybody can mess with. Right now, that pretty much universally means Word. PDF won't cut it, since you can't edit it. ODF and other formats are just as good (i.e. pretty crappy, actually) but MS has pride of place: everybody else is using it and changing to a different standard is a huge hassle.
W. Richard Stevens writes: (Score:4, Insightful)
has been a style rule for many years, yet it is amazing that most word
processors do not do this! I just smile when I pick up a book produced
with something like Frame and you immediately find these errors.
Needless to say, troff does this correctly, and has for 20+ years. A
friend commented to me that normal evolution would have gone Word to
Frame to troff, but instead, the computer industry has gone the other
way!"
-W. Richard Stevens, author of 7 popular technical books. [R.I.P.]
All word-processors suck (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used Wordstar, Wordstar 2000 (or 3000?), WordPerfect, MS Word, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice writer and they all pretty much suck. Most people misuse them. They don't integrate well with other software. And they produce ugly results.
I wrote my master's thesis using FrameMaker which was quite a bit better. However, for my current document-production needs, I use LaTeX. I maintain the manuals for my company's software products and we have a great workflow for building the manuals. The same Makefile that builds the software also builds the manuals: PDF versions directly from the LaTeX and HTML versions using htlatex run on the LaTeX sources. Then a post-processor fixes things up so that our HTML documentation is linked context-sensitively from the web pages of our app, and special goodies like embedded training videos are placed in the HTML documentation at the right place.
The power and control we get from this workflow is unmatched.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
which held its own, against many, many competitors, not because of a megacorporation strong-arming it (remember, MS was not always a megacorp)
Actually, that's most likely the reason why it succeeded. 1) MS pushing their OSes through anticompetitive practices (confirmed in court!), 2) MS having intimate knowledge of their own OSes helping them write better apps, 3) customers buying MS Office for various reasons including more hassle-free operation on their PCs, 4) the whole network effect thingy kicking in.
Rapture of the Nerds author doesn't like Word? (Score:4, Insightful)
That about says it. Nobody else cares. I've been using Word since it came on two 5-1/4" floppy disks and included a mouse and used every version since what? 1983 or so? (Before that I used Zardax on an Apple ][ and, of course, WordStar.)
There's not a damn thing wrong with Microsoft Word. It is quite adequate--superb, even--for 99% of the people 99% of the time. I've written several 300 page books with it, including extensive indices, sidebars, tables, graphs, and pics and it works just fine. No, you can't do EVERYTHING you might want to do with it. And you might actually have to put some time in learning how it works, but ONE thing is CERTAIN:
It's not going to go away. The chances of it going away are equivalent to the chances the United States will convert to driving on the left. Only the nerds care about the arcane details under the hood.
Nobody else gives a rip.
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, let's use articles from 2006 and 2008 to illustrate a state of things in 2013...
*shakes head in disbelief*
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
enough said!
MS Office is designed for use by the 9-to-5 clerical worker --- not the outside studio or in-house team that designs your four color catalogs, print adds, brochures and annual reports.
Am I Asking Too Much? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm writing a document that will be printed out on paper with black toner.
At a minimum, I don't want e-mail addresses or URLs changed to blue, or underlined, or hyperlinked.
My number two wish is a switch that says:
Anything pasted into this document will adopt the formatting of the line into which it is being pasted.
I cannot think of a single instance, ever, when I wanted the formatting from some web page to be carried over into my document. My final wish is to find a word processor that assumes, or at least makes really easy to specify, that the Page One Header will not be used on subsequent pages. I don't recall how Word does that these days, but in LibreOffice it involves creating a style just for the first page. Assuming that you've managed to Google the specific forum post that tells you that.
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
The disbelief part is that an article from 2006 is still relevant to describing Word.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Word and HTML suck for physical publishing purposes, as neither truly describes a page layout. Anyone who's been frustrated by paragraphs suddenly flowing over a page break, or tried to view html on different browsers has experienced that problem. Sending the publisher a Word doc gives you no guarantee that why you get back looks like what you had on your screen. PDF and PS at least nail down the exact page layout.
There are great uses for flexible standards like ebook format, because they aren't restricted to a particular page layout. Ebooks can flow to the readers screen size and whatever font size they picked. PDFs suck for digital books because they don't reflow.
It does the job (Score:4, Insightful)
Word may have flaws, like every other piece of software ever written. But it does the job. Millions of not-so-computer-savvy people are able to created good-looking documents using it.
WordPerfect relied on the embedded codes model, but they never did get it completely right. For anything non-trivial, you pretty much had to go down to the code level, hand-placing the codes to make the text render properly. Copy-and-paste across formats was often disastrous.
Word's model might be conflicted, but it works. There are very few situations where the wysiwyg editor can't get the text to look like what you want.
If I'm creating a document, I don't really care whether the encoding is HTML or RTF or docx or whatever, I just want it to look right, and Word does that.
Re:W. Richard Stevens writes: (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, I can't imagine why people would use Word over this [sourceforge.net].
Christ. This article, like so many here at Slashdot, summarizes to: Usability matters. Usability matters A LOT. Open source developers still don't fucking get it.
Here's a thought: if you want people to stop using Word, why not make something better than Word? Shocking.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
So much this!
Word is popular because it is can be manhandled by just about anyone with basic computer skills into producing a passable document. Most people doing anything more complex have a variety of tools available with various trade-offs in functionality and learning curve.
This is largely true about most popular products. Tools which are technically inferior for a purpose are used because the gap in technical fitness is smaller and lest costly than the difference in skill required to use the better suited tool. Cheaper to have the hammer than can pound in most nails when you don't really care as long as it holds, then go get the specialized hammer when you do..
Re:Rapture of the Nerds author doesn't like Word? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm...
My mother, who is 84, finds LibreOffice easier to use than Microsoft Office, and she has Microsoft XP.
One place I worked had Microsoft Office as standard, but I found the way it presented fonts for selection clumsy & difficult to use, so I installed OpenOffice (this was prior to LibreOffice in 2002) and exported in .doc format with no complaints from anybody receiving my documents.
Microsoft Office does not come standard on most Linux distributions, and is harder to use.
LibreOffice is freely available for all major Operating Systems, and also for Microsoft's Operating Systems.
All Word Processors have problems, and there are things I don't like about LibreOffice - but I still prefer LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, even when I have to use a box with a Microsoft Operating System.
Microsoft is on the way out, its market share has dropped below 20%. Note that Linux is on over 90 of super computers (the rest are mainly Unix), most mobile phones are either Linux (i.e Android) or Unix (iPhone) based, eBooks are based on Linux, and so are smart TV's. Embedded devices almost invariably use a Linux kernel. Automotive electronic systems are standardising on Linux. The vast majority of computer graphics for special effects in films is done using Linux, with Apple holding the bulk of the balance. If you fly on an A380, the entertainment system runs on Linux. The International Space station converted totally to Linux a month or two back. Note that Valve has found that Linux is the future of gaming. Only on desktops & Laptops, does Microsoft still dominate - but Linux and Apple are eating away at that.
Linux tends to be a lot more efficient than Microsoft and a lot more secure. Plus it is a lot more configurable, even by mere mortals - and for power users, it generally has more to offer. Companies can bring devices to market with Linux faster than they can with a Microsoft Operating System (due to its Open Source nature and better design), and they can make a profit in a market that is to smaller niche for a Microsoft product to be commercially viable.
So, even in the United States, I expect that most people will be using Linux or Apple on desktops & laptops within 5 years.
Why ranting is a nonstarter (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not rocket science if you want Word to die write something better and cheaper the market is willing to accept over word.
I hear a lot of talk, fancy words but no hint of what would replace it or what could be done to even start to remedy the situation other than clicking your heels and wishing the evil Redmond monster go away. Talk is cheap, real monsters don't go away because you ask them nicely.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time, it demanded WordPerfect because docs had to be just that. Aggro clerks of court would shitcan anything that deviated from the expected (monospace) fonts, spacings, margins. I'm sure that's still true, though I know standards have slipped a bit - proportionally-spaced fonts are allowed now (Times New Roman seems to have become the standard.)
I took a summer job helping a white-shoe law firm convert from WP51 to Word over one summer almost 20 years ago. It *was* madness back then but their IT department was all over that windows 95 shiny shit.
Word sucks, but like Excel, it's a highly-evolved (or at least accreted) multi-tool. There's no single replacement for it.
-Isaac
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
He discusses why the file formats are the way they are, but I'm not sure he says they suck.
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
the only big difference is now word and excel are in XML. sometimes, and only partially
The main thing that isn't in XML is any embedded media files, and encoding those totally as XML is a really bad idea. "Let's encode our video as XML!" sounds like one of the scarier jokes that people tell about the W3C...
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:4, Insightful)
You can pull out a windows 95 and office 97 for dummies book and be able to do everything in them with windows 7 and office 2013.
That is the true state of things.
Erm Ribbon bar. Also the current version of Windows is Windows 8, despite what people would want to think.
The true reality is that Microsoft have pissed user interface consistency against the wall. So what you said is true of Windows 7 and Office 2006 but no more.
Doesn't change the fact that the GP is still wrong though, I'm just being pedantic.
Re:ugh (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The OS is not office. The OS was anti-competitive. Internet explorer bundling was anti-competitive. But at the time when this was going on my computer shipped with Word Perfect installed on the Microsoft OS. Even now you typically will *sometimes* get an MS Office TRIAL version unless you expressly pay for Office as well. This is quite different from Windows where you're hard pressed finding a computer without it.
2) Office never used intimate knowledge of the OS. None of the Office features then and now require any undocumented APIs. About the fanciest thing Office was doing when taking the lead was adding it's document formats to the "File > New" context menu and that is also well documented.
3) Hassle free operation was the GP's point. Office did what people (not geeks or technical writers but common down to earth folk) wanted it to.
Re:Rapture of the Nerds author doesn't like Word? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's not a damn thing wrong with Microsoft Word. It is quite adequate--superb, even--for 99% of the people 99% of the time. I've written several 300 page books with it, including extensive indices, sidebars, tables, graphs, and pics and it works just fine.
Will you hate me if I tell you that you could have created that book in less than half the time with Framemaker, the best publishing application of it's time, damn you Adobe for abandoning it! One major problem with most Microsoft supporters is that they live with such blinders on. "Word is great" is synonymous with "I've only ever worked with Word and now know so many work arounds for all its deficiencies that I'll never change." Word and Excel have so much legacy cruft that I find them mostly unusable. In the words of Larry Wall, simple things should be simple, and hard things should be possible. I can't think of a single Microsoft application that follows that mantra.
Re: Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Office Documents are a "done" trchnology now. Microsoft frankly doesn't give enough of a damn to bother fixing it at this point... Is operational leverage over big installs that there is still "secret sauce" embedded in the spec.
Microsoft can throw HUNDREDS of millions of dollars at devs to implement the crappier parts of win/x86 MS Word formats on ARM or PPC with each revision. Ultimately rewriting just helps people get away from MS at this point, why bother.
Much of Bill's strategy in the 1990's was simply to swamp even their own partners and OEMS with so much incompatibility they spent all their time fighting eachother and not him.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
you are supposed to write things. Then you twiddle how it looks a bit at the end.
That's hardly how any business document in existence is written. Layout is considered at the same time as the content. Presentation is often more than 50% of the value of the document. It is essential to be able to make edits right in the final output. Nobody is willing to print the DVI, then mark it up with a red pen, and then to find corresponding code that programs that piece of the document, and then to change it ... and once you change something on page 1, things cascade down to page 100 - pictures and tables jump onto different pages, blank areas show up where none were before... this means you need to redo the DVI and review after every change. To compare, a WYSIWYG wordprocessor gives you exactly what you are going to print for given page settings. You just go from the first page down and make your changes. That's why MS Office (and WordPerfect before that) rule the office space, not TeX. Those wordprocessors do a pretty good job on having things done your way, with background pagination and other niceties.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:2, Insightful)
It isn't necessarily instant live update, but it is a far cry from paper and markers.
This still does not explain why an administrator, or a marketing worker, or an accountant, or even an engineer, should use a less convenient product if there is a more convenient one.
I understand that from the point of view of theory of computing the MS Word format is a disaster. However who in the industry could possibly care about that? The value is in ability to fire up the wordprocessor and have the final document as soon as you put the last character in. Note that Word is a default editor in Outlook, and it makes sense because Outlook defaults to HTML content because people want rich text in their email.
TeX was a major innovation in 1970's, when it was written to operate first decent printers. Today probably it's the best compiler for documents - if you want to compile yours. Most people don't do that; they instead wing them - start typing, and then improve the presentation and the content as things develop.
Programming of a typeset output is not popular for the same reason most people use calculators instead of Matlab. Programming of anything requires thinking ahead; thinking not about what you have here and now but what you will have after this or that step, and about what happens after that. It's a very different skill from calculating every intermediate value and then staring at it until you know what to do next.
I tried a couple of LaTeX front ends, and they kind of worked... in a clunky, slow way. But I couldn't understand why would I need one, since I don't deal with complex equations on a daily basis. If I were, I'd definitely run away from the disaster that masquerades as Equation Editor in MS Word. (It's a pain to use.) But my needs are simple - just as 99.99% of needs out there are.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)
With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content.
You must be kidding. Microsoft Word has far more formatting capabilities than any HTML + CSS content I'm familiar with. Try creating text with a multi-coloured gradient fill and a drop shadow. Try representing a complex mathematical equation. Try inserting a pie chart. Try inserting a date field that updates automatically. Try rotating a block of text by an arbitrary number of degrees.
Then consider that fact that many people using word processors in business today are capable of doing all these things without knowing a single thing about coding.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually HTML+CSS can do all those things. Your comment about programming is weird, because presumably you would just use a WYSIWYG interface rather than writing the code by hand, the same as any modern word processor.
The real problem with HTML/CSS is that it isn't designed to format documents with precision, it's designed to describe the presentation of information. In Word when you set a font to 14pt you get a 14pt font on the screen and on your printer. In CSS setting a font to 2em or 24px results in an on-screen/paper font size that is dependent entirely on how the browser is set to render it. 2em is relative to the base font size selected by the user, 24px is relative to the DPI setting of the screen and the zoom level of the browser.
I would love it if everyone used HTML/CSS because then documents would display in my preferred way with my preferred fonts and scales, but most people just want to quickly create something that looks exactly the same on everyone's screen and on paper.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, very easy. Just go learn MathML, SVG, and JavaScript. Apparently your idea of the "real world" is where everyone is conversant is 4 or 5 programming languages. As opposed to what actually happens in almost every business around, where people with minimal knowledge of computers and zero knowledge of programming can produce what I described with a single, widely-known application.
The assertion that Microsoft Word should be deprecated in favour of a hodgepodge solution like yours, in the majority of situations, is laughable.
Re:Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)