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From: chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Word 3.0 - Too Many Bugs?
Message-ID: <19103@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 18-May-87 13:28:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.19103
Posted: Mon May 18 13:28:55 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 19-May-87 05:08:27 EDT
References: <6531@amdahl.amdahl.com> <876@eneevax.UUCP> <6187@dartvax.UUCP> <882@sputnik.COM> <836@goanna.oz>
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Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality, uLtd
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>> Of course not -- and, for light use of Word 3.0 (at home, composing short
>> articles for the net and magazines), I haven't had that many problems,
>> either.

It ain't bad for heavy use, either.  I beat the heck out of Word 3.0 about 5
nights a week publishing a newsletter (using Word for the writing before it
gets laid into RSG 3) and my own personal writing.  I do a lot of worse case
editing stuff (from the point of view of Words memory management) and
generate a lot of words and a lot of documents. I'd say I'm well on the way
to becoming a Word power user (if I'm not already there) and I find 3.0 to
be a nice tool.

It isn't the end-all of Word Processors, but if you look at the market,
nobody has done a better job of doing what they did. Fullwrite might give
them a run for their money, but I won't worry about that until Fullwrite is
shipping.  In about three months, maybe.  Word, glitches, bugs, and all, is
on the market, functional, and in daily use.

You can bitch all you want, but until someone shows me a program that does
what Word does at least as well as Word does it -- and does it for the power
user, not the light duty folks [definition time:  If a word processor does
not have Postscript capability, style sheets, glossaries, first page
header/footers, and a reasonable global search/replace functionality, I
can't use it].  Nobody comes even close to Word 3.0 when you're talking
about heavy-duty usage -- if you think MacWrite is good enough, you
shouldn't be playing with Word, and you shouldn't gripe about it's being
complicated.  Yup. And that's because it does a lot of stuff.  You may not
need all that stuff, but there are lots of us out there who do.

chuq


>
>What really made me angry was the fact that the simplest things could
>not be done properly, eg. paragraph formating (hundreds of paragraphs
>get realligned, change justification, lose fonts as a side effect of
>formatting one paragraph only), try to convert Word 1.0 to Word 3.0,
>or even worse try to go back to your old format, you'll see headers
>running one letter per line, in font size 56, etc...
>  
>> As you say, there will always be bugs in released software; the question is,
>> how seriously do they (as a whole) impact the use of the program? 
>> After the error reports began swarming in, they fired the project manager 
>> for MS Word 3.0.
>
>Well, I do not believe it is a problem of a single manager.
>The problem must exist in Microsoft internal management structure and
>its development and marketting policy. Also I believe that they must
>have immence staff problems to let the Word 3.0 disaster to happen
>(perhaps they reclassified their technical staff to management?).
>Obviously they had to find a scapegoat.
>
>Jacob


Chuq Von Rospach	chuq@sun.COM		[I don't read flames]

There is no statute of limitations on stupidity