Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!uvaarpa!mcnc!raw From: raw@mcnc.org (Russell Williams) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: More on WordPerfects Reasons Summary: WP is the best I can find Message-ID: <4389@alvin.mcnc.org> Date: 5 May 89 23:57:00 GMT References: <45600063@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <6550@homxc.ATT.COM> Organization: Microelectronics Center of NC; RTP, NC Lines: 100 In article <6550@homxc.ATT.COM>, doug@homxc.ATT.COM (D.SULPY) writes: > > I wonder if it has ever entered WordPerfect's collective head that their > lack of sales isn't due to a problem with Amiga owners, but due to Amiga > owners' problems with WordPerfect. I'm not a WordPerfect owner (and never > will be), but the reviews I've seen of it here on the NET are generally > far from favorable (no WYSIWYG being the most common complaint). WP's I've been really busy at work, so I haven't been able to post till now, but here it comes: THE DEFENSE OF WORDPERFECT I have been reading reviews of wordperfect for the last couple of weeks. Unfavorable reviews. And I can see the reason behind them. WP is not the simplest program to use, it's not WYSIWYG. But it IS the most powerful wordprocessor I know of for the amiga. When I say this, I'm excluding TeX for the obvious reason that there is more to wordprocessing than typesetting, such I have an Amiga, and I bought it soon after it came out, because it looked far and away the best computer on the market. It had great graphics and sound, and I like games, so I got it. But I would never have bought it if I hadn't thought a good wordprocessor was going to come out. And there are decent wordprocessors, but none as good as Wordperfect for large projects. I have never found anything on the Amiga market to even compare with WordPerfect. I bought ProWrite when it first came out, and I borrowed a friend's excellence to try when it appeared. Neither of these packages run fast enough to edit anything over 20 pages with acceptable speed, excellence of course, dragging far behind. WP is FAST, blazingly fast. I can edit huge documents with little loss of speed, and after the first two revisions, it has never crashed on me. Never. ProWrite still crashes after the 2.0 version, and doesn't approach WP's power. Excellence is a joke in this department. I saw my friend using it two months ago, and it crashed twice in one hour. Admittedly, my friend was editing a large document, and was trying to do a lot look like it came out of a high quality typewriter. Maximum readability is what I want out of the output. I have a lot of friends with font based wordprocessors, and frankly, they can't write a grocery list without it looking like a ransom note. More fonts than brains seems to be pretty prevalent with This isn't to say that I think WYSIWYG is a bad idea. I like it a great deal of the time. But I pay a price in speed for it. Now, I could cut my docs into smaller pieces, but I haven't seen any WYSIWYG wordprocessor that could cut it with docs longer than twenty pages, and that's frankly ridiculous. Besides, my definition of a good wordprocessor is not something I have to work with. I want it to be invisible. WP does take some initial work. But after a couple of days of using it, I never had to look back at the manual unless I was doing something incredibly tricky. And for people who complain about a large manual, I have just one response: Let it be as large as it needs to be in order to be complete. I get really tired of writing letters and calling customer support about how to run a program. WP's manual is the finest manual for any software I have ever purchased. I have never had trouble finding the proper section, following their examples, and getting what I want after one try. Contrast this with ProWrite's first manual, which shipped with addendums and still necessitated letters and phone calls.. biased attitude that the Amiga is basically a game machine suggests that > they never took the Amiga seriously enough to consider the features that > Amiga users demand. WP portrays it's I.B.M.-Mindset by it's insinuation > that CBM will only have "it's act together" when it offers itself as > a serious competitor to I.B.M. in the business market -- God, I hope > that never happens, because it would mean that all of the things the > Amiga does best would be wasted on...uh, bar charts, and perhaps the > synthesized voice droning out per capita incomes. Yuck. It might suggest this, but nothing could be farther from the truth. WP Corp. took the Amiga seriously. WP for the Amiga is a full blown version of their program. Their Apple IIGS port was a scaled down version of WP. That's the machine they didn't take seriously, and that's a machine made by Apple! What really upsets me is that I'm starting to think that the Amiga is not purchased by most people with writing in mind. I realize that for a large percent of the population, a program that can comfortably handle twenty pages and a number of features is sufficient. And that's fine for them. The kicker is somewhat self-centered: I do write, and I write a lot. English papers on WP are a dream, and large chapters are easy as well. If WP advances significantly beyond 5.0, my computer will be inferior to an IBM for the whole thrust of my having a computer, which is writing. I don't want to have to get an IBM. I don't want to WANT to get an IBM. I love my Amiga, but I also love WP. Unfortunately, I don't think that I'm representative of the Amiga market. And when WP Corp. says that CBM will have to gain a larger share of the business market, it only stands to reason. Business people typically generate a large number of reports which utilize fairly esoteric functions of a wordprocessor. Unless CBM could somehow target the "author's market", business seems the only defined market that would generate increased sales for the kind of wordprocessor that WP represents. For that matter, it wouldn't exactly hurt to see the Amiga in business. Think of those bar charts! It can do incredible things when unleashed, and any computer being used to accomplish a given task is NOT being wasted! So it's a shame the Amiga has to lose WP - the prestige associated with > WP's existence for the Amiga probably helped the Amiga's reputation > in the general public - but it's probably best they're quitting now. > I'm sure some Amiga-specific company will fill the gap, without wasting > the thousands in development costs WP keeps whining about losing. > You think WP whines? Wait till you hear me start whining as I sit around the computer store waiting for "some Amiga-specific company" to fill the gap. It didn't happen before WP, and if they're right, and the market is not large enough to support a product like WP, then it's not going to come out. The only market I see growing is the bridgeboard market. Russell Williams