Microsoft Word is an extremely complex, massively powerful, awe-inspiring, extremely popular, state-of-the-art pile of crap. It's funny how large and successful companies find it too easy to go overboard on the feature list of programs that have been on the market for a long time, and this piece of software is amongst the worst of them.
Ingenuity is, of course, a good thing. But ingenuity combined with a huge feature list is entirely different. The former involves carefully designing, planning and development. The latter is just a load of modularised add-ins to the detriment of usability. Both purport to enable you to do more things, wherein lies the misnomer: just because there are more features, this doesn’t mean to say that you can accomplish more. There are three reasons for this, and the rules are synonymous with programming languages*:
No-one is ever going to be bothered to trawl through masses of documentation to see what’s there – and, even if they get that far, how to use it properly – so it never gets used.
By the time you’ve discovered what’s on offer and how to use it, you’ve lost more time than could have been put to use doing things in a simpler way.
By providing the user with fewer and simpler tools, these can be combined much more easily to do more things. Smaller building blocks are not only more flexible, they also enable the user to do things in their own way.
Try as it might, Word is not as crap as OpenOffice.org, though. At least Word doesn’t try and fail to pretend it’s something else.
* cf. Graham, P. (2004) "Hackers and Painters: Essays on the Art of Programming", ISBN 0596006624
1 comment:
Microsoft Word is the best example of a piece of software with a huge feature list full of easy to come up with, off the "top of their heads" option features and gimmickry, such as unnecessary display choices, and repeated representations of buttons and options, all of this at the expense of hard thought out features, that aren't required by every user, but are always needed by the few who need to use a word processor often.
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