No, really? Last I heard, he was deep in the innards of Linux
And on his way to making Scriv run on Raspberry Pi :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
Rhubarb crumble… smart arse!
Both wrong. Scrivener draws its essential nourishment from the traditional Cornish pasty, and, like that esteemed culinary masterpiece, “T’is a proper job, me 'ansome!”
I don’t get why you’d put corn in yall’s pastry. Anyway, down 'round these parts we got these exotic little critters called possum.
Possum pasty? Tasty is’um?
Hmm, my wife just made me watch a documentary on burlesque (honest! It was quite good actually). But now I’m confused by “possum pasty”. I don’t think the word “pasty” is being used in quite the same way? I blame vic-k. Not so much for the pasty mayhem, just in general…
Oh NO! 
I’m not going to suffer with this mental image alone: I just had a vision of vic-k in a leather welder’s apron, possum fur pasties and… rhubarb crumble.
Rhubarb crumble? It’s the whipped cream that scares me. Do you think the welder’s apron might carry through to Vic-k’s dominatrix obsession?
This Cornish pasty is definitely a “Proper Job”.
By the way, no possums or other exotic critters were harmed in the making of this culinary delight. So there! 
:mrgreen:
Anything is possible with enough ketchup.
Actually Scrivener is funded by an alternative revenue stream.
I knew it!!!
Is that a bottle of Jamesons on the shelf above that Guinness?
At least that would solve the mystery that is vic-k. 
Mystery?!! Mystery my tootie!! (if you’ll forgive the rude word 
)
Fluff
Someone call the wahmbulance.
I prefer Scrivener for my writing, but Microsoft Word suited me fine until my manuscript got really large. Scrivener is a niche tool for writers. I really love it and prefer it for that purpose, but for general stuff, Word is better. And you really can’t compare the two. Besides, you don’t have to deal with Word until you finished your work. Just export it and be done with it.
It always makes me laugh when people blame their own incompetence on the software. This sounds like an angry guy who’s angry with Microsoft in general while being stuck in principles way past their expiration date. Let’s be honest, no one really gives a shit what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did in the 1980s and even less people even know what BASIC is or the Apple Lisa.
I really like the ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007. Sure, it took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it, I got a lot faster at a lot of things. It was a nice upgrade from the old-fashioned menus and I never had any problems with it. And besides, real pros use keyboard shortcuts for the majority of actions.
Word has been a great friend for me through college, because it’s an extremely complete package. It’s the only word processor that makes it easy to insert beautiful tables, smart objects and images, and it has great tools to keep track of sources and adding a bibliography in the appropriate style. I recently installed Office 2013 (on Windows) and it’s by far the most feature-rich word processor out there with great built-in cloud functionality.
If MS Office really sucked as bad as the author suggests here, people would abandon it, plain and simple. Look what happened with Windows Vista. Consumers and businesses avoided it like the plague. MS Office a great suite for 99% of users and Microsoft couldn’t care less about the angry 1% that laments over the good old days and how unfair it all is.
Wake up and smell the coffee, pal. Microsoft Word ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Going further on, there is a bottle of Tanqueray. I guess the mistery is fading away, drop by drop.
Paolo
Well it still isn’t on the iPad and iPad is one of the hottest markets outpacing many other devices in current and future sales. (many people are replacing aging PC’s with iPads).
Also take into account things like Google Docs, Open Office, and PDF taking over many users who are tired of proprietary formats and restrictions and you see a decline in Word usage over all.
But hey awhile back VHS was all the rage and when the DVD came out people swore that 4 Head VCRs weren’t going anywhere.
You can still buy a 4 head VCR in some stores, and even find somethings on tape. The main use for VCRs now a days is to have one watch old tapes. Then again during the transition phase many people sold those VCR to DVD devices which moved more to DVD and pretty much made the VCR obsolete.
Word is headed in the same direction. There is not one thing Word does better than anyone. It does many things “ok” but the only reason why it is still around is legacy usage and people who haven’t “changed”. We are in the transition phase where people want to share files, open them on many different devices, be more open standard in a lot of cases or to run slim and trim to save battery. Instead of 1,000 features you probably will never use - instead you might use an app that just specializes in that one thing “There is an app for that”.
The mentality of the user has changed faster than Microsoft’s business model. Gone are the days of locking files to one system or only sharing with others who also pay premium. Here are the days of startups and fast apps, sharing and instant gratification. Connected devices and open formats.
Now a days with apps in the $0 - $50 range why is someone going to pay hundreds for MS Office? They aren’t because now with connected devices you no longer can justify the Premium price for Office for many users. Hence the decline in sales over the years.
With the internet and the “cloud” gone are the days of the Office requirement for compatibility. Here are the days of the “Connected Device User”. Microsoft is way behind in that market and will have to make big changes to their business model or they will continue to suffer attrition and eventually will fade away from the consumer market to dwell in the corporate market of servers and services…
Nothing lasts forever. To think otherwise is futile.
Are you calling me incompetent?
I write books for a living. I’ve written (and sold) books using Microsoft Word. My hatred of that product is informed by hardcore experience; I’ve been using one variety or another of word processor and text editor for close to 30 years; I’ve been using MS Word itself on and off since 1991: I used to work as a programmer: I have a computer science degree: and I still don’t like Word.
And just to bring the discussion full-circle, here’s why I still use Word (despite everything) …
Oh-ho! Now you’ve gone and stepped in it, b-man! Perhaps blanket insults aren’t the best way to go, especially here, where we try to keep our debates civil-like. We even succeed for the most part.
I for one am more persuaded by Charlie’s arguments than by yours, though your tone does make it hard to judge your words with anything approaching dispassion.
As a thought experiment, imagine that the world has for several years been essentially happy using some non-Word program.
One day you’re handed the BETA version of a brand new word processing program called Word and asked to evaluate its readiness for release. To get things started, the BETA team asks to you to evaluate the new program’s:
- Ease of use
- Quality of documentation
- Reliability
After a couple of weeks or so of working with the BETA, you’re asked to report your findings.
The first question is, do you recommend that Word be released? Or will you report that the BETA team has more work to do?
And based on what you’ve seen, do you believe you’ll want to switch to Word or continue using the existing word processing standard?
Cheers & have fun,
Riley
SFO
P.S. I’ve been working with computers since 1981. I also have a reputation among co-workers as a highly effective user of a wide variety of software tools. Including Word. Despite this I’ve never enjoyed working with Word and would be perfectly happy If I never had to bother with it again…
Wrong questions. Or rather, they imply a context, but don’t make it explicit. I’d rephrase:
- Will the users of (current market leader) find it easier to use?
- Does the user interface make it easy to discover functionality?
- What is the value proposition for existing users of (current market leader)? Why should they go to the effort of switching?
(The implied context is the state of the existing market. What any developer with a new product is looking for is either a non-existent market – Scrivener basically built its own market for Scrivener-like tools – or a program with the capacity to disrupt an existing market, as Apple did when they released the iPhone into an already-saturated smartphone market.)
As to the answers:
Word is very easy to use for simple tasks. It’s rather difficult to use for complex tasks. The range of tasks it can be used for is sprawling and covers some really arcane areas, but the expertise needed to make best use of it is so esoteric that corporate IT departments have to employ Word specialists.
Let’s remember that the average user of word processors has little or no IT training. Some studies showed that around 80% of users of MS Office on Windows didn’t know about the Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V shortcuts for cut and paste, or Ctrl-F for searching; around 50% didn’t even know that cut and paste was possible, and were using Word as a glass typewriter.
Exposing functionality buried deep in the menu hierarchy via the ribbon seems like a good idea to the technically literate who want to make things easier for the illiterate. Unfortunately they overestimate the literacy of the illiterate; we train users to ignore user interface clutter such as greyed-out menu items or window decorations, so they also tend to ignore the ribbon (it looks like more incomprehensible clutter) or find it a thing of terror (full of scary stuff they don’t understand).
Word has some bad habits. One is autocorrect and autoformat. Again, this is the sort of “hlepful” behaviour that techies think will assist novice users. Rather, it results in Word making random, arbitrary, and sometimes counter-productive changes to the novice user’s, impeding their ability to learn a consistent set of actions for achieving their goals. When stuff sometimes happens “by magic” we can’t learn to associate cause with effect.
Another bad habit is modal dialogs, but that’s not unique to Word: that’s a general problem afflicting GUIs that should have been fixed in the early 80s before Xerox let them out of the lab. And then there is the horrible collision between direct formatting and hierarchical styles – two different paradigms for document layout control that simply don’t work together. Yes, experts can cope, but most people aren’t experts.
Then there are files. Don’t get me started on files. Suffice to say, after two decades of trying, I [i]still[/] haven’t managed to get my mother to understand the relationship between a file, a document, and a window on the screen of her iMac. Or my brother-in-law. Or my sister.
So, no: I don’t think Word is easy to use. We fool ourselves into thinking it’s easy to use because compared to Word Perfect 5.1 it’s got lots of nice graphical bits and it shows you an approximation of what it thinks the final document will look like … but it’s not, really. Stick Pages for iOS in front of a 4 year old, or an 80 year old, and get them to write a letter. Then replace it with a PC laptop with Word. That’s where we should be going – cloud storage, no “save” dialog, an uncluttered UI that only shows the user the tools when they want to see them. I’d love to see Pages with a macro language for the power users (see also Editorial on iOS). That’d rock.