Re: [WinMac] MS Office differences between platforms (was: Re:

cathyf@infocom.com
Wed, 28 Jul 1999 17:51:25 -0400

> We don't trust Microsoft to test the
>next release of Windows with any other vendor's products completely,
>especially competitor's products. We do believe that Microsoft would
>release a new Service Pack which breaks their competitor's products and
>then we would be in a situation where we don't have anything that works
>because we chose not to use Microsoft's solutions.

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who thinks that.... I replaced
the Office 98 icon on my mac with an icon of The Brain (of Pinky and the
Brain, if you don't know the reference you've been watching too few
cartoons lately) because The Brain (a genetically altered lab mouse),
like Office 98, is always "trying to take over the world"! To my
consternation, when I tried the Office98 uninstaller (so I could
reinstall properly with different configurations), even though Office98
was on a different partition it decided to wipe out my Word 5.1 folder
without even asking about it!!!! I had to reinstall Word 5.1, thank you
very much. That is NOT how mac programs are supposed to work.

In my experience also, even on the mac Microsoft products don't play well
with others (and probably run with scissors, too). To make matters worse,
they are just clunkier than other products. I don't think it's because
they are more complex, they just don't seem creative and elegant. It's
probably a company thing -- the way they run the company might attract
certain personality types, or else company policies may restrain people
from doing things the way they might if they were in a different
environment. The sheer size of Microsoft is probably an impediment to
creativity, I've noticed that tiny outfits often produce the best
software.

But undoubtedly poor company ethics comes into play also, since Microsoft
always seems to be trying to get rid of excellent programs by various
dubious practices -- either undercutting a small competitor as they did
with Netscape (giving IE away for free and trying to get big sites to
make themselves inaccessible to anything but IE), or buying up the
product and then demolishing it so everybody is forced to use their
crummy substitute. They're kind of the Wal-Mart of computer software.
Once the locally-owned businesses are pushed out because Wal-Mart can
take a loss for a while in one community, folks have no other choices. So
I do think it's possible that Microsoft would deliberately "break" other
products in their next Windows version.

And certainly they don't seem to have extensively tested for obvious
conflicts and bugs. As a matter of fact, simple bugs have survived from
version to version. I remember being astonished when I discovered that
the Glossary Greek kappa was still wrong (just an ordinary non-Greek k)
when I upgraded from Word 4 to Word 5.1 -- I had to redefine it again,
pasting in from the list of symbols. How in the world could they miss
that?

On a related note of cross platform compatibility -- Don't know how
helpful this is to your problems, but I've recently had great success on
my mac dealing with .tif faxes e-mailed to me by a Windows-based Austrian
colleague (he says he created them in Microsoft Exchange format) using
the shareware mac program GraphicConverter. I had previously tried to do
MacLink conversion, opening in Word 98 and simple graphics programs with
not much success (I always missed the second page of the faxes, for one
thing). I even tried opening them in my old WordPerfect 6/DOS in
VirtualPC, but the TIFF format was too different for the old WP to handle
properly. But GraphicConverter effortlessly opened the multi-page docs.

GraphicConverter also dealt wonderfully with a .jpg file a translation
client sent me -- although I had been able to open that one in JPEG
Viewer and print it, using GraphicConverter was much better for me
because I was able to increase the resolution up to 200 dpi so I could
run it through OmniPage Pro to ocr it. Presto change-o, I had a Spanish
text file that I could overwrite with the English translation!!!!

I know that GraphicConverter works with JFax docs also, since I found the
link to it on that site. Here is the url for GraphicConverter, there is a
30-day free trial period:

<htpp://www.lemkesoft.de>

                           Peace, Cathy Flick cathyf@infocom.com

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