nesses that live or die by technological innovation," wrote James Gleick in
The New York Times Magazine. "They get soft. They make poor research choices.
They bleed both profit and invention. They poison the marketplace that
created them."
Word for all writing and editing. So why do I bite the Word that fed me?
run new versions. When the software continued to behave erratically, upgrade
after upgrade, I began to feel misused and abused. I had heard rumors that
Word harbored viruses, that Word reported back to Microsoft the details of
your hardware configuration every time you launched it, and that Word was
a manifestation of the devil. I had creepy feelings that somehow Microsoft
could read what I was writing.
way it corrects your grammar before you can finish the sentence. Word rein-
forces bad rumors and ugly feelings by acting so stubbornly and annoyingly
the same as it has since 1995. Yes, if you spend some time, you can eventually
figure out how to turn off or adjust some of the most annoying features (see
Figure 4-1). But this is your time I'm talking about. You already paid for the
program; why should you also have to spend more time teaching it to behave?
default settings to any image you place or table you create, regardless of what
came before. Or how, after two decades, I can still make it crash by using
the
they can no longer find the spell-checker? How often do you want to choke
that paper clip character that pops up with inappropriate suggestions (see
Figure 4-2)? How many Word docs have you been unable to open for some
reason or another, and when was the last time you got a flawless result by
saving in an older Word doc file format?
FrameMaker, only to find that publishers used QuarkXPress, which either
ignored or mangled my style definitions, rendering them irrelevant. I cranked
up that Microsoft monster just to compose emails, only to find that it con-
verted some of my text into some alien alphabet that others couldn't decipher.