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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: BILL GATES.....MICROSOFT SUCKS!
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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 02-14-2006 07:26 PM
It has amazed me for years that Microsoft dominates the market because most of their applications have incredibly awful UI and they frequently violate classic and documented GUI conventions. Word and PowerPoint drive me up the freakin' wall!!!! But I do think that Excel is quite good. Excel's advanced features are a little hard to understand and the Help screens are worthless, but at least the UI makes sense.
And Microsoft apps don't play well together. Ever try to use Visio to create objects and then place them into Word or PowerPoint? Sometimes it works, frequently it doesn't. Sometimes you get the object at original size, sometimes PowerPoint reduces the size and sometimes it pushes some other object in PowerPoint out of the way.
I happen to be doing a lot of work right now in PowerPoint. If I take a heading from one slide, let's say it's in 12 point bold Arial and paste it into another slide to replace a heading that is also in 12 point bold Arial, the idiot program changes the type face to 18 point. Ridiculous! (and it's not because the master has an 18 point heading, because it doesn't.)
In Word, if you back up a paragraph because you want to get rid of an extra line space between paragraphs, it frequently completely changes the type style and it's not necessarily the type style of the preceding paragraph, which at least would make some sense.
In Word, if your cursor is at the top of the page, and you draw something and then want to start typing again below the diagram, you can't do it. The cursor is still at the top of the page and you can't re-place it with the mouse or cursor keys. If you use the Enter key to move the cursor, the diagram moves down. You have to remove the diagram, press Enter until the cursor is below where the diagram would be, then re-paste the diagram. And that's aside from the fact that objects can never be placed precisely because they stick to a grid.
And the rulers in Word make absolutely no sense at all. A ruler should never move - it should start at the left border and extend to the right border of the page. Microsoft's rulers move. Frequently, they simply disappear. You should be able to copy a ruler that you "like" from one section of a document to another - but you can't. Apple's cheap word processor MacWritePro had this feature about 15 years ago.
I could understand this if Microsoft was a tiny start-up producing these apps with small teams of programmers. But Microsoft has tens of thousands of programmers working on these things and they're still garbage. It's not that Microsoft doesn't spend lots of development money on these apps, they simply don't know how to make an application that has an intuitive and consistent user-interface. They should spend less time adding advanced features that no one uses and instead improve the UI on these products.
There's a great article about PowerPoint called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" by Edward R. Tufte, the author of the classic, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and several other books about visual information design. He makes the case that PowerPoint presentations "usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis." He argues that PowerPoint "replace(s) serious analysis with chartjunk, over-produced layouts, cheerleader logotypes and branding, and corny clip art."
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 02-15-2006 12:29 AM
Wow, someone else who hates Word as much as me! And here I was feeling like an alien and out of step with the times (roman). I have a kindred brother who hates it too!!
Martin, EVERYTHING you said, I have experienced it all and it has turned what few hairs I have left to gray. Spend HOURS forcing the damn thing to put text and objects where you want them and then you make the mistake of adding as insignificant as one last little period and the ENTIRE page completely turns into a badly animated cartoon with everything scrambling into chaos -- stuff scattered helter skelter, hither and yon and some elements just disappearing completely. Many times I have just had to settle for NOT have that last period just because it was easier than wrestling with the damn program from hell. And what about the way it handles font changes? You can't find where the change happens. Logically, the font change should follow the curser; in Word, it is just the opposite and you have to put your curser one letter ahead of the font change point and retype that letter and then backspace to erase the extra letter you created. Well, it’s hard to explain, but trust me, it is totally, completely illogical and ridiculously counter-productive. How do I know this, because in WP, it is exactly the opposite. I can't tell you how many times my lady has looked over at me at the computer, quietly mumbling under my breath, punctuated with the occasionally shreak an a fist punching the table like a person with terretes, and asking me who it is that I am cursing and wishing I could personally administer the hang-him-by-his-oh-henry torture. “Why the geek scumbag programmer who wrote this Microsoft Word pile of putrefied puke,” says I. “Oh” she replies. ![[Mad]](mad.gif)
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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
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posted 02-15-2006 04:26 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
... Microsoft would literally have to buy Apple Computer to make that happen in the graphics arena.
Err - they did, more or less. Back in 1997 MS bailed Apples's ass to the tune of $150m, without which Apple would by now be only a distant memory.
MS did this, of course, for all the wrong reasons - it wanted to prove to the various organisations that were investigating it (inc the DoJ and EU) that there was a competitive marketplace, and Windows wasn't a monopoly, and having Apple exist was a item of evidence supporting that assertion. Thus $150m, a drop in the ocean for MS, was money very well spent.
Unfortunately, this bailout enabled Apple still to be with us, and so we have two mainstream GUIs which from a distance look similar, but when you are used to one and try and use the other, you discover that they are very different. I would far rather that Apple had vanished, and then all software would have one user interface. I'm not saying that as an MS supporter: I'd be just as happy if Windows dissappeared leaving us with the Apple GUI, I just want one or the other, not both.
As I've written before, there are companies that have product for both the mac and windows platforms, but although the product may run on both, it's attitudinally aligned to one or the other, and thus almost unusable by a member from the opposite camp. An example of such software was (happily no longer existing as a product) Logic Audio for Windows (LAW), a mac product almost unusable by a windows user.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-15-2006 10:32 AM
quote: Martin Brooks
It has amazed me for years that Microsoft dominates the market because most of their applications have incredibly awful UI and they frequently violate classic and documented GUI conventions.
Microsoft Office didn't rise to prominence over simply being the best product. It rose to the lead because Microsoft aggressively bundled the suite in many new computer systems, often twisting the arms of computer makers to do it. They also made sneaky little changes to Windows to break the office suites others were selling.
quote: David Buckley
Err - they did, more or less. Back in 1997 MS bailed Apples's ass to the tune of $150m, without which Apple would by now be only a distant memory.
Regardless of the previous parade of knuckleheads who ran Apple, Microsoft's cash infusion to Apple was not an outright purchase of Apple. They don't own the company. And they don't have any legitiate footing in the creative software industry. They are King in office products, but they are nobody in terms of graphics.
Microsoft must accomplish several things to gain any traction in the graphic industry.
First, they must make their MS Office products play nice and have file interoperability with industry standard graphics programs -such as being able to output EPS and PDF files and do so correctly. They can't seem to even figure out that very basic first step -even with their shitty Publisher application.
Next, they have to actually make creative software products that graphics people will want to buy as alternatives to industry standards like Photoshop, Illustrator, CorelDRAW, InDesign and QuarkXpress. Professional graphics people don't gain their creative software by having it bundled in with new computer systems. It's sold separately. As such, it has to stand on its own as a good product.
Microsoft would also have to make any new graphics programs available for multiple computing platforms. Going Windows-only, as they're obviously doing with Expression and Sparkle, is pretty stupid.
And Microsoft must gear their graphics programs to graphics people, not computer programmers. That's another completely idiotic thing they're doing with Expression and Sparkle.
With all the things Microsoft must do to get anywhere in the graphics industry, I feel they pose little threat to Adobe. If anything, Adobe should probably be more concerned about Apple's moves than that of Microsoft. Apple actually makes a lot of professional level creative applications that people love to buy (such as Final Cut Studio).
quote: David Buckley
I would far rather that Apple had vanished, and then all software would have one user interface. I'm not saying that as an MS supporter: I'd be just as happy if Windows dissappeared leaving us with the Apple GUI, I just want one or the other, not both.
Having just one computing platform would be incredibly bad. And bad for lots of reasons. It would make life even easier for scumbag criminal hackers. It takes away any competition or incentive to improve the interface. It stifles innovation.
I'm hoping the new Intel-based Macs will be able to dual boot Windows Vista along with OSX. I would very much prefer to have freedom to choose whatever platform I want to use without having to repurchase all my software all over again.
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