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"Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customer
by CurtHagenlocher 15y ago
"Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files."
Wait, what?
In any event, he's clearly not the right customer for the product. Neither am I; my pathological hatred of Word has dimmed over the years and settled into a mild perpetual annoyance. An itch, if you will, that you dare not scratch too long or it will likely draw blood. And I got to that point even before I got hired at Microsoft four years ago.
But I've also seen times when some of Word's abilities (like the "Track Changes" feature being dissed in the article) are not only useful but essential. Example: a language spec being worked on by several people and actively reviewed by several dozen more.
Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business who's using it to churn out various types of paperwork -- not for the person who's just trying to write some text.
- CurtHagenlocher 15y agoAlso, no thread about Word would be complete without that mix of grimace and dismissive smirk we reserve for people who paste screen shots into a Word document, then attach it onto an email in order to send them to us.
- politician 15y agoWe should also include Microsoft's obnoxious tendancy to release read-only documentation as mutable docx files instead of portable PDFs or even in its own not-invented-here PDF format, XPS.
- codeka 15y agoScreenshots pasted into Word documents are awesome. Even better is when they're pasted into an Excel spreadsheet!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- lotharbot 15y ago> "Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to-large business" I've heard it said that Microsoft's "right" customer is themselves. They're a gigantic company that builds gigantic documents. Many of the esoteric features of Word were developed because somebody in Microsoft wanted to use them.