Re: Word in 2010

[Chris Borokowski <athloi -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Imagine you're a contractor, journeying between
organizations. There are fifty-four tools out there.
You will be hired partially on the basis of what tool
you know. Now imagine the same situation where there
are four tools available. Do you see what I'm saying?

I don't consider Microsoft Word to be the right type
of tool for technical writing, but I'm not anti-Word.
It does a lot of things quite well, like the whole
Office suite, and I'd use it immediately before
picking up some bug-ridden disaster like OpenOffice or
WordPerfect suite. It is not intended for structured
document authoring, in my opinion. It is a tool that
tries to capture the broadest cross-section of all
those who must type words into a page and save it, and
so much of its functionality is a compromise.

I have seen overproliferation of software, and in the
end, it can be destructive, just as the cross-browser
problems in web development have become. This is why I
argued for a middle ground in this case, because while
I'm not in favor of a Microsoft-only world, I'm also
not in favor of the chaos the open source and small
software companies would unleash on the profession
without some kind of large anchoring force like
Redmond.

$0.02, spend wisely ;)

--- Kevin Amery <kevindamery -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

> I don't know about you, but what I do is either a)
> learn the tool that
> my organization has chosen (if I don't know it
> already) or b) evaluate
> the tools that are available, pick one that matches
> my needs, and
> learn that. I don't make a point of learning every
> available tool just
> because it's there: I learn specific tools because
> they're necessary
> and/or useful.

User Interface design blog
http://user-advocacy.blogspot.com/
Code::Design::UI::Consulting
http://www.dionysius.com/

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