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?"
It gets worse (Score:5, Interesting)
No, loathing not really contagious (Score:5, Interesting)
If he has a better idea of how to set up a word processor, he didn't see fit to share his thoughts with the rest of us. But serious suggestions only, please. If the author wants Microsoft to make Word more like vi, I think then we'd really see some "loathing both understandable and contagious" from ordinary users.
I don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly makes Word so bad? It seems functional enough, and I fully admit that maybe I'm just not understanding the finer points of some programming strategies, so what's the deal? He obviously hates Microsoft for things like buying up all these focused program adons like spell checkers from other companies, and wrapping them into Word, yet seems to think we'd be better off with somehow managing dozens of such apps if they were still separate companies and programs. He then goes on to act talk about how he hates being forced to use Word when he does just fine with other options... like Vim, of all things.
He mentions things like control codes and hierarchical style sheets being "fundamentally incompatible" yet the way he describes them they are basically the same thing. He very well may have a point, technically speaking, but he sure does a crappy job of getting it across.
End the end, the article kind of reminds me of some guy who's bitching about how the automotive industry should have gone with diesel instead of fuel 70 years ago.
Re:Malice vs. Incompetence (Score:3, Interesting)
the only big difference is now word and excel are in XML. sometimes, and only partially. but hey it is an open standard now right?
Windows including 7, word, excel, and their file formats haven't changed much in 15 years. Mostly a few new features, and cosmetics. 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.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to format a document in Word. You just need to use styles.
NEVER try to figure out why a paragraph or couple of paragraphs are behaving the way they are in Word. That is the way to madness . . ..
Create for yourself a collection of styles that make paragraphs do exactly what you want them to do. Refine them, and use them to impose your will upon the paragraphs that you do not understand.
Now . . . I'm trying LyX. I want to see if it is even remotely adaptable to doing lawyer work.
Re:ugh (Score:5, Interesting)
because it was good at doing what users wanted it to do.
That may be how it got the crown, but that is not how it kept it. The scrappy upstart company is very different from the Microsoft of today. For proof I submit the release of Vista and Win8 with no apology. At least with MS Bob, there was remorse!
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, there's the TeX engine and the default macro packages which are different things.
Actually, I was talking specifically about the generic TeX engine properties that make it virtually impossible to use it for incremental redisplay and similar purposes, so you have to go WYSIWYM instead, but then TeX isn't the foundation for the document platform itself but just the output module, which is what I was pointing out. It also doesn't work well for compound documents, not just simple hand-edited text ones ("simple" as in "not compound", but not excluding structured and large ones, of course), but that's sort of outside of TeX's scope (if you ignore Web2C's [\immediate]\write18, or yet another converter to "lower" the document data (for example, data linked to a live online resource) into something "set in stone" that TeX can actually typeset), so perhaps that would be an unreasonable request anyway.
You are not bound to plain TeX or LaTeX or a few others, write your own.
That doesn't solve the problem I was referring to. One potential solution that occurred to me the other day was that since TeX's state tends to be small, and the processing is "paged" in the last stages of TeX's internals, one possible option would be memoizing the internal state of the processor and resuming the execution only from the nearest place preceding your edit point in the input stream where the last state snapshot took place and going on from there. But that still requires a modified TeX implementation, and it doesn't work for multi-pass processing that, i.e., collects page number references to scatter them throughout your document in a later pass (a single inserted character could change the page number on a page reference on the very page you're editing right now, and there's no way to know without running all the full document passes again, and there goes your real-time redisplay), and that tends to be quite common, so tough luck.
Apparently you need to be reminded. TeX is a system for "automating stuff", not a system for interactively enabling tweaks by hand.
Apparently, I failed to get my point across. Of course TeX can do that, but the document application with TeX export has to export the document structure into the TeX file properly, and I have yet to see a complex application doing it in a user-friendly way. Nowhere am I suggesting that *TeX* is the right place for the necessary user interaction. If you're accusing me of a desire to do stupid things, you had better point out which ones, since I fail to see which part of my requirements is unreasonable.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. TeX uses a procedural approach, which is really not a good idea for a document. A declarative approach would be much better, and there are alternatives such as lout the demonstrate how well it works. Heck, even TeX has both styles and formatting codes available at all time.
HTML, much abused, has a much saner model. But there is a distinct lack of good editors for HTML. Which also proves zealots wrong who say "a good and well documented format will attract support". MS Word is still the most widely supported document format. Better documented alternatives (lyx, html, lout) are impossible to import/export in anything but a handful of programs.
And to be honest, Word 2007 is a completely different beast from Word 2003. I would even go as far as calling it quite usable - it deals nicely with styles, and it finally has an acceptable equation editor. Float placement is still a bit of a gamble, citations are best left to other software packages, but it is really not all that bad any more. Good enough - typical Microsoft software.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:4, Interesting)
Lack of competition = stagnation (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
There is a recurring problem with software development in recent years, where one player has become dominant, the barriers to competition are so high that it has no real challenger for a long time, and the result is stagnation. There are numerous examples: Microsoft Office for business documents and spreadsheets, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, Autodesk applications in the 3D modelling space, IE6 as the classic beloved of web developers everywhere, and as an odd one out just to make the point, Linux if you want an OSS operating system.
There are a few ways out of the trap, but the big problem is that the people making purchasing decisions often aren't interested in assessing the quality or productivity benefits of alternative software, or even able to make informed judgements about those things if they wanted to. No-one ever got fired for buying the market leader, so while they know that the new subscription pricing model will give vendors even less incentive to actually improve anything or the support contracts are probably far more expensive than they're actually worth or the TCO will be horrendous because of usability problems, they'll carry on using these leading products anyway so their careers aren't at risk.
That creates a vicious circle where no-one is willing to invest the staggering amounts of time and money required to build a heavyweight competitor that can effectively challenge an incumbent. Instead, we get open source clones or cheap-and-simple web/mobile apps, which do a good enough job to save some users paying for the heavyweight commercial software, but in most cases offer little real innovation and almost invariably lack the quality and feature set of the established big names. That's why the professionals spending serious money keep buying those big names, and so the cycle continues, with little incentive for software giants like Microsoft to improve their cash cows or innovate with entirely new products.
I think the most likely way out of this in the long term is for a new product to arrive that changes the rules and moves the market. 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. Probably every programmer reading this routinely uses far more powerful editing, review and collaboration capabilities in their everyday tools. I don't just want Word 2014 any more. I want something that helps me collect, organise and share information in ways that match how we'll be living and working in 2014. And a tool that does that might have a small chance of breaking the Word stranglehold.
Beware of recruiters asking for MS Word format (Score:4, Interesting)
People, if you make it as far as an interview be sure to have enough paper copies of your real resume to hand around in case you've been screwed over by the recruiters. In one case with me they cut out five years of relevant employment because they wanted to put forward one star canditate and two duds. My current employer short circuited the process by interviewing all three and no longer users that unethical recruitment agency.
Re:Here's the real problem he has (Score:5, Interesting)
The situation in publishing is very different than what you're imagining. Word is just how the text gets edited up to the point where page production starts. Then the whole thing is converted to InDesign or QuarkExpress. The reason to use Word is actually just because it's convenient and supports change tracking and reviewing, so it's convenient for communicating copy edits and dev edits to the author, and allows the author to accept or reject changes proposed by the copy editor.
What would be better would be a common document format that is used by the tool authors use, the tool copy editors use (probably the same tool) and the tool designers use. The designers would simply style the text for a specific page layout, which avoids the issues you're talking about. Significant edits after layout would still break the layout, but that's something the designers have to deal with during the final edit of the page proofs anyway.
The problem is that neither Microsoft nor Adobe is at all interested in an open format for their tools, for reasons Stross explains pretty well in his article. And since there is no competing tool that _does_ provide this functionality, the situation persists. What Charlie is complaining about now is what I was complaining about in 1997 when I co-wrote the DHCP Handbook. I find it amazing that nobody has successfully broken this deadlock, despite all the changes in the publishing industry since 1997 (it was actually old news even in 1997).
Anyway, the reason I mention HTML as a good format is that if the tools supported it, it could literally carry through all the way from the author to the final electronic book. Any shared format would work; HTML just happens to be insanely popular and widely used, which is what makes it (IMHO) the right choice.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
They're all solving different problems. TeX is designed for typesetting, which HTML and Word formats aren't well-suited. HTML does structure well, but it's useless for typesetting. OOXML is a weird mix, not really well suited to either task. It's better than older formats, but it's still incredibly painful to generate, and near impossible to read. If I had to guess, it's designed to give MS the ability to say that the format is open, while still making it difficult for competitors to support.
With the "ribbon", I can't really use Word anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
I have crappy memory. I'm not one to remember arcane macros or shortcuts. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is as far as I go.
Never fear - nested menus always helped me find things.
Now with the Ribbon in Office, first I have to search each of 5 or 6 ribbon views. They aren't grouped very meaningfully so it's basically a linear search. Then if I don't find what I am looking for I am basically stuck, since I can't remember how to find items that aren't on the ribbon, and I can't really search on them, because I am not exactly sure what they are called. So I end up using Word like a glorified notepad.
The design team that killed the menus on Word (and those kids who are doing the same on browsers) don't realize the damage they are causing end users.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
The primary argument used to dismiss Libre Office as a viable alternative to MS Office is that it "can't do anything more complex than basic document editing".
And yet here we are, explaining why MS Office is the popular choice because it only does the most basic stuff that 9-to-5 clerical workers need.
Re:Long live TeX and LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
This is true. I'm a physics graduate student and I use it for all of my homework and I even use it for taking notes in class. The shortcuts are so intuitive and easy that I can manage to spit out complicated formulae just as quickly as it is written down on the board.
Unfortunately, the system isn't very stable and at times needs to be restarted after a long session of a couple of hours of running. I was once rushing to finish some homework that was due in an hour and the underlying whatever-lisp became corrupted somehow that everytime I activated an figure area, it would crash. I had to literally reinstall the program to get it back to a useable state (and I was able to finish the homework on time!)
Nonetheless, it is a powerful and awesome program, but alas, like most OSS projects lacks the man-power to become the stable, reliable tool that it could be. I personally have considered carving out sometime to contribute to TeXmacs since I use it on such a regular basis.