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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Document-Centric, or use free?
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Mike Sanders: "I don't believe in the document-centric future and if you are telling me that Microsoft is going to try that again, I will unload all my Microsoft stock ASAP."
Heh, what we're doing goes beyond documents, so don't worry about that. But, you might rethink your stock investment strategy. Adobe is making a billion a year off of its document-centric approach. They are in the process of building a third skyscraper smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, thanks to the profits from their Acrobat line.
"Beyond documents". hmm. Maybe if they fixed Word first, I'd be more impressed. It was a usable application back in the Word for Windows 2.0 days - the suckage has increased exponentially since then. In what ways? Well, let's take something simple - bullet points. Frequently, I'll have to prepare a list of points to shoot off to someone at corporate. It's always a fight with Word. It refuses to put the damn bullets where I want them - which is to say, indented from the previous paragraph. As best as I can tell, new bullet points are randomly placed. I'm sure there's a setting for it somewhere - buried in a totally opaque set of tabbed dialogs. And the "helpful" menus that learn which options I use most frequently and hide the rest - those are irritating as hell - they rearrange the menu picks and defeat the learned moves I make unconsciously with the mouse. Which rocket scientist made that on by default? Numbering is every bit as annoying as bullets - I've actually given up and gone back to hand numbering, since it's predictable - there's simply no telling what wild idea Word will have as to what number comes next.
So let me summarize for Scoble - before you guys give us some great new way to deal with documents, go fix the tools you have now. I would like to see less innovation in this area, and more simple utility
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