Re: Rumors of FrameMaker's Death are Untrue, says Adobe

[Arlen P Walker <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>]

Well, the reason for Word's success is twofold:

a) it's made by MS
b) it's adequate for most users.

An MS product only needs to be adequate to succeed, because of the marketing
clout it enjoys being the monopoly supplier of desktop OS's. Anyone else's
product needs to be better than adequate to have the same chance of success.

Luckily for the marketplace, it doesn't seem to be that difficult to produce a
higher quality product than MS does, and it seems that MS also has a long
history of producing inadequate products, most of which end up being given away
later in an effort to prove they weren't so inadequate after all.

Word (speaking as a Word user for many years, Mac version 3.02 to be precise
which I believe predates every Windows version except 1.0, but as one who has
deleted it from my home systems) is a twitchy product whose useful features
always seemed to me to be at least one dialog box too far away to be useful. It
was gratifying to see MS adopt such modern features as drag and drop editing,
but rather irritating that they only implemented it within their product,
rather than using the Mac OS-supplied drag and drop hooks which would have made
it possible to drag text not only to a new location in the current Word
document, but to (and from) other documents in other applications, such as
email clients, text editors and HTML editors. It was rather disappointing that
I had to resort to a shareware text editor to collect the varioius scraps of
text from multiple sources and only after that load the resulting collection
into Word for final processing.

Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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Opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
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