Re: tlug: What's wrong with Microsoft?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Philip" == Philip Jarvis <jarvis@example.com> writes:

    Phil> Jim Schweizer wrote:
    Jim> ps Pointcast (and my scanner) are the only things keeping me
    Jim> tied to Windoze - I really should work on the scanner... anyone

    Phil> Are these really the ONLY things keeping you tied to
    Phil> Microsoft?!

What keeps me (personally) tied to Windoze is the TWAIN driver for the
scanner (manipulations are done under Linux via Samba), WinReader Pro
(nihongo OCR, pretty wizardly, too) and zconnect (IrDA for the
Zaurus).  Donald Becker (of 3cXXX.c fame) is working on the latter, so
I'm holding my breath (the Sharp software will never get bought out by
Bill because the UI is irreparable) :-).

    Phil> Let me begin by saying that I'm a recent Linux convert and
    Phil> wish it would displace MS in the marketplace.  However, I've

Why?  Linux is not for people who need MS.  Linux is for people who:

    (1) just love computers and wanna do it themselves
    (2) need a high-performance cheap system without a warranty
    (3) want to rewrite the OS without signing waivers
    (4) need Unix compatibility without warranties or waivers
    (5) need open architecture networking (eg for custom firewalls)

MS "usables" (they are objects, not subjects :-) don't need or want the
above.  I'm sure you can think of more examples of where Linux shines,
but "usables" don't need them, either, I betcha.

    Phil> yet to see any evidence that it can do it.  It seems to me
    Phil> that the biggest things helping Microsoft are its general
    Phil> purpose applications.

None of which were the best in the business when they beat the
competition into the ground.

    Phil> If we're going to proselytize to all the Wintel pagans out
    Phil> there, we've got to make Linux sound appealing.  Certainly
    Phil> you can't beat it's price.  But what about usefulness?  When
    Phil> I need to write a report, I fire up ol' Win95 and use Word.

"When I need to write a report, I fire up ol' Win95...."  Why do you
do that?  Dunno about you, but the people I know who use Word use it
because there are lots of nifty effects on the toolbar, and the fonts
it comes with (or are preinstalled with Win95) are well-designed and
readable.  That is, it's easy to write a good-looking report - as a
one-off.  You won't write that one again.  But it looks good, and
doesn't hurt your boss's eyes.  If your boss won't admit he's going
blind, you can easily make it 16pt type.

You can do all that with LaTeX, but it requires preparation (more on
that below), and many special effects are not easily achieved by
snagging things off the toolbar.

    Phil> What ARE people using for a word processor?  For that

I don't.  :-)

    Phil> matter, what does Linux (or ANY UNIX box for that matter)
    Phil> have that can match MS Word.  LaTex?  Spare me.  The only

OK, I'll spare you.  But _I_ can't really use a word processor.  I'm a
wordsmith, not a desktop publisher, and I need plain-text source
documents for version control.

Way back in the dark ages when Byte's "User's Column" was a sometime
thing (not only was I born that long ago, I was reading Byte that long
ago!), Jerry explained how his buddy Larry (Niven) would not switch
from "Electric Pencil" because it had no toolbar - it didn't even have
a status bar telling you about your henkan processor and current mode
and line number like even Emacs does nowadays.  Larry's business was,
and is, beautiful words, not pretty pages.  He wrote, and then he
rewrote, and then he shelved it because it _sucked_ but he didn't know
how to fix it, and then he pulled it out again and rewrote it.  And
there was no TrueType to hide the ugliness of his words behind the
beauty of the fonts.  So all he wanted onscreen was words - _his_ words.

That's the audience LaTeX is addressed to, with a twist.  (I insert
that word "twist" because of course Larry doesn't use LaTeX.  He
almost certainly uses Word nowadays - but I bet he has it configured
with the toolbar off.)  I have LaTeX boilerplate for faxes, for
personal letters, for technical reports, for article submissions, for
cover letters for article submissions, for referee reports, etc, etc.
Most of them are hacks, some have been converted to .sty files (yup,
I've been doing this since long before LaTeX2e).  With AUCTeX to
handle the sectioning, tabular, and font handling commands, I rarely
need to do anything but type words and do cut-and-pastes.  The final
version will be edited to get reasonable pagination for long (> 5
pages) documents.  This is actually easier than using Word.  (But I
don't embed many pictures, although that's not very difficult with a
little forethough, nor spreadsheets.)

Being an anal kind of guy, everything longer and more public than a
fax or cover letter gets registered in RCS, and I'll be moving to CVS
soon.  I do lots of diffs, especially on long-shelved papers, so I can
get some idea why the paper looks the way I don't :) remember it.
Can't do that on Word documents without saving them to ASCII first....
And you lose most of the efficiency of RCS repositories because RCS
deltas are line-oriented.  But most people don't care about that,
because they don't use version control.

I'm moving to Linuxdoc-SGML, especially for class notes which get
formatted at least three ways (notes, OHP/handout, WWW).  But that
doesn't have the letter and fax formats and so on yet.  Again, all of
it is registered in RCS, and I do use the diffs.

Do I recommend this system to most other people?  I do not.  They
don't need it, and it won't do them much good.  I do recommend to grad
students and others who will very likely make careers of producing
multiple revisions of long, interrelated documents to try it; even
there, it takes a particular kind of personality for it to be
worthwhile.

    Phil> serious contender I've come across is a UNIX version of
    Phil> WordPerfect. But that carried a pretty steep price tag and
    Phil> its functionality didn't justify the premium.

    Phil> How about a spreadsheet?  Anything to compare with Excel?
    Phil> Is there ANYTHING that can compete with Microsoft

No.  Not in its domain.  You need a new app.

    Phil> applications?

Of course.  Until Bill got through with running the competition out of
the market, none of Microsoft's products were feature-for-feature
better than the best of the others.  But "MS Office Suite" was a
marketing stroke of genius (even if he borrowed the idea of
consistent-look-and-feel from Apple and the idea of bundling all the
usual apps together from Osborne).  All of Microsoft's products are,
and were, strong contenders.  As somebody else pointed out, all the
commercial wordprocessors are way over-featured for most users.

    Phil> I'm asking these questions in all seriousness.  Microsoft's
    Phil> strength lies in more than just its marketing department.
    Phil> If there were some reasonably priced, supported, AND
    Phil> easy-to-use applications that could run under Linux, I'd be
    Phil> happy to wipe that DOS partition off my hard drive and would
    Phil> try to get my officemates to switch.

Don't you think you would be doing them a disservice?  Hating
Microsoft is one of my hobbies, but Microsoft is a GoodThang[tm].
It's not Bill's fault I'm a "hentai" who doesn't find his software
very useful for my applications.

"Usables" need support and good documentation.  Bill gives us that, at
the "usable" level.  (He tries hard, anyway.)  "Usables" need features;
they are not willing to (most cannot) write macros/scripts to extend
functionality.  Bill gives us that, and if it means that the features
you use per MB of memory required is asymptotically approaching zero,
so what?  Memory gets cheaper every day.

All I really want from Bellevue is a little more breathing room for
the software _I_ want.

    Phil> breath though.

Agreed.  I think, for the reasons expressed above, that hoping that
Microsoft will meet serious competition from Linux is unlikely in the
office app domain.  Furthermore, I don't think that it would be a good
thing in any case.  Linux office apps should be targeted at permitting
Linux users to free perfectly good Pentium boxes from the drudgery of
occasionally running Word and OCR software.  This I would like to see, 
although I probably _still_ wouldn't use them myself.  But I know
several people who would benefit from the Linux environment,
especially if they could use RCS.

Targeting Linux office apps at freeing "usables" from peonage to
Bellevue would require ... you guessed it: Microsoft to start
producing MS Office for Linux[tm].  You heard it here first :-) I'm
not sure that would be a good thing, but I'd like to see him try!

    Phil> Yoroshiku, Phil

Kochira koso,
Steve

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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