The War Of The Word

atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."

Re:The Old New Thing

[Frizzle Fry]

Someone please mod the parent up, it's a shame that is languishing at score 0. It's also a shame that the writeup didn't link to this blog when discussing the msdn blogs.

Re:I call fake blog

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Mac to Windows switcher. I was a full fledged MacAddict subscriber. I became disillusioned around OS 7.6 and switched to NT 4.0. I have never looked back. Now I use XP as my desktop and Slackware as my server. I can see no reason to ever use Mac again.

People love them now but they use to be a real disaster. Constant lock ups, awful memory management, 10 yr old GUI, battery fires, and constant promises of the great new OS around the corner (Rhapsody or Gershwin or BeOS or whatever). I also worked for two different companies that made the switch from Mac to NT with thousands of users.

There were tons of switchers but no one likes to admit it too much. It is definitely not popular to praise Microsoft and bash Apple these days.

Re:It is usually easier...

[theAmazing10.t]

Sorry wrong link, try:

• http://www.programming-reviews.com/Undocumented_ Windows_A_Programmers_Guide_to_Reserved_Microsoft_ Windows_Api_Functions_The_Andrew_Schulman_Programm ing_SeriesBook_and_Disk_0201608340.html
• http://news.com.com/2100-1001-217732.html?legacy =cnet
• http://www.macdailynews.com/comments.php?id=P255 5_0_1_0
• http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1572110,00. asp

Lie of Omission?

[VernonNemitz]

If he didn't mention the fact that every time Microsoft released a new version of Windows, competitor products like WordPerfect suddenly became incompatible while practically-simultaneously-released new versions of Word were compatible, then he is failing to mention a major reason why all the anti-Microsoft folks are certain the company is guilty of cheating. Those competitors, after all, were not told of changes to Windows early enough to be able to release new versions compatible with the newest Windows. That does qualify as Monopoly Abuse In Action.

A bit more history

[Nom du Keyboard]

Windows 3.0 came out and it wasn't a toy. It wasn't great, but it actually worked well enough that people found they could be productive using it. Windows 3.1 (and then Windows for Workgroups 3.11) came out

What made Windows 3.1 successful was really two things, neither of which really involved the gee-whiz-bang GUI interface:

1: Since printer drivers were now part of the standard operating system, once a printer driver existed for Win3x, it worked for every program in Win3x. This was a huge improvement over getting the proper printer driver for your particular program.

2: At Win3.1, True Type scalable fonts were integrated into the operating system, which meant they now worked with every Win3.1 compatable program. Hard for many people to remember -- or even imagine -- days before scalable fonts were common everywhere as they are now.

The was also better memory management for extended memory.

But those two items alone are really the big deal of Win3.0/3.1 -- and they are a big deal.

Re:Chris Pratley

[fitten]

How many years has Microsoft developed software for the Mac? How do you develop software on a Mac without having a Mac? You'd have to be some kind of idiot to think that he got fired for taking a picture of Macs being delivered to a company that *has been making software for Macs for 15+ years* prior!

Policy: "Notices to employees: don't take pictures of the campus and post them for public viewing without permission from the management or you'll get fired because it's a security concern."
Employee:
Microsoft:
Slashbots:

MO-Rons.

Re:Microsoft's most valuable soldier in Word Wars

[timts]

"Word and Excel (which until then had been called Multiplan on DOS, and "Excel" only on the Mac) had been rewritten from scratch as all-out Windows applications. And people liked them. Word 1.0/1.1/1.2 actually won some reviews against DOS WordPerfect, especially in things like ease of use and WYSIWYG editing. The Word team knew they had something, and put a laser focus on WordPerfect customers, asking them what they hated about WordPerfect, and making it a product goal for Word 2.0 and later to deliver features that made the most annoying things in WP trivial in Word. Other moves were tactical. The Word planning team discovered that the WordPerfect sales force was going around to customers and showing Word opening a complex WordPerfect file (printer.tst) to show how bad the conversion was, and therefore how pointless it would be to try to switch to Word. So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then). Their goal was to make any WordPerfect doc open flawlessly in Word, but in particular their goal was to have no errors at all on printer.tst. Later the Word sales force used that same file when talking to customers as proof that Word 6.0 could open WordPerfect files flawlessly. " read this one, it takes them so long to make it able to import wordperfect?

Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/ms_tuncom/major/mtc-00 028565b.htm [uscourts.gov]

Excerpt:

If competitors don't know about these hidden or undocumented calls, their applications will not work as well as Microsoft's Microsoft had long denied that it deliberately designed hidden calls into its operating systems, but in the summer of 1992, Andrew Schulman, a programming expert living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a book Undocumented Windows, which confirmed that Microsoft had lied. Microsoft later acknowledged that Excel and Word used at least 16 APIs that had been hidden in Windows.

Re:REVEAL CODES!!

[Vicegrip]

"What are you talking about? Word does have it, and always has IIRC. Click the paragraph icon on the toolbar or go to Tools->Options and set exactly which codes you want to see."

Obviously you've never used Wordperfect or you would realize that it has far superior code markup viewing. Word perfect codes are similar to HTML markup to a certain extent: they have a start and end tag and can be deleted and moved as well. It is very easy to figure out a formatting problem by just looking at the codes.

Re:The real reason Word "won":

[Anonymous Coward]

Borland's first line of Windows versions of their software had to be developed with VERY little knowledge of the Windows API

It was worse than that. Back in the Win3.0 days, MS bald-faced-lied to 3rd party developers about changes that would be in Win3.1.

My company at the time spent big bucks on SDK and a trip to Redmond to get our app ready for Win3.1. Changes to USER.exe that couldn't possibly have been last minute changes held our app back by months. And we aren't the ones.

This is common for MS. Ask people who coded for Go's Penpoint tablet PC about how MS sales lied about the timetable and plans for Penwindows. They were gung ho about it until Go died. Then they pulled back on Pen Windows until Palm shipped. After that, they dug the product up and worked on CE.

Re:It's over, so soon?

[JamesKPolk]

1. StarOffice and OpenOffice are basically the same software.

2. Star got killed in the market.

3. After buying Star Sun gave up on turning StarOffice into a profitable product, instead releasing it under a free softare license. This goes against a trend set with Solaris and Java, so it's plain they saw no hope of competing with Microsoft at their own game.

Yes, Microsoft won the proprietary word processor market. They're the best at that game.

Re:AmiPro? Me too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved AmiPro and had a difficult time migrating to Word because MS had not mastered the "usability" theory with their GUI.

AmiPro was integrated into Lotus WordPro. Lotus no longer supports AmiPro.

Here is a guy who refused to let go of the lovable app:
http://www.fontworld.net/_en/amipro.html

Re:Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

16 APIs out of 4,000+. Wow, I'm impressed. WordPerfect must have been hopelessly hindered, like everyone else that writes apps for Windows.

Those functions are almost entirely all in the "shell lightweight API", which are just fucking shortcuts that wrap more complex stuff, like registry access. Most of them were not published because they were experimental. It was common practice for many years to use them by loading the DLL dynamically and calling them via function pointers.

They have since been documented. Use Google to look for "settlement interfaces".

Try again.

Re:Ann Coulter has got it right

[Ffakr]

Because of the court's miraculous discovery of a right to sodomy last term, gay marriage is now on the agenda in America.

That's funny, I didn't know we had a 'god given' right to sodomy. I though Americans simply had the right to keep crazy right wing religious nuts out of our bedrooms and out of our lives if we so choose. .. But I suppose that's pretty much the same thing, isn't it?

If Ann Coulter has got "it" right, whatever your "it" was.. it's too bad she hasn't got anything else right. You should REALLY page through Franken's book. You don't have to agree with his politics or his agenda, but he does a brief but powerful deconstruction of some of Annie's contentions in her last book. The outright lies and blatent mis-representations are just plain sad. Maybe she should have AT LEAST employeed an editor or fact checker. Maybe then she wouldn't have published blatant falicies.. like claiming that someone was bad because their father was a socialist candiate decades ago (the 'father' in question was NOT actually the persons father, or any relative.. and the "Socialist" was pushing all kinds of crazy ideas like Social Security.. how evil!)

I'm sure there is a nice warm spot waiting for Annie in the after life, if you are disposed to such idologies (and I think you are). Think a whole lot warmer than a Florida beach if you are creatively thinking impared (and I think you are). :-)

Ah well, I'm bored.. the day is done..
I'm heading off to the gym.. then I'm going to make to time to hate people who aren't like me. After all, I hear that being a right wing nut job is where the money's at.

Re:I call fake blog

[blastedtokyo]

He's real. Just google for him. Here's an old biography [unicode.org]at a non-microsoft site.

Re:Microsoft's most valuable soldier in Word Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

If Microsoft can make money shipping Office for Mac, I'm pretty darned sure they could make money shipping Office for Linux. But they'd never do it, b/c it'd give companies an easy way to migrate off of Windows.

And having them on Windows allows them to abuse their monopoly power and control the game.