Re: XyIII+ in WinXP

[Mark Garvey mark.garvey@xxxxxxxx]

When my employer standardized on Word--I'm thinking it was around '93 or
'94--it was a real blow to those of us who had been using Xywrite. There
had been no standard until then; some were Xywriters, others Wordperfect
or Word users. We were only about five years out of our IBM Selectrics
at that point. But the company settled on Word. It seems to me that MS
simply out-muscled everyone else in getting their software into the
marketplace, reeking offal or not, and companies were convinced that
there was money to be saved by standardizing. Our IT dept was also
pushing for it, naturally. And I have vivid memories of one particular
operative from that dept standing in my office doorway insisting that my
reluctance to move from Xywrite to Word was only because it meant
"stepping outside my comfort zone." I thought about stepping into his
comfort zone with a bookend or something. I continued using Xywrite for
most of my work for the next five years, resorting to Word only when
absolutely necessary. But by the time I showed up at Thomson, in 2001,
Word's dominance was a fait accompli.
In my view, the consuming public was smitten with mouse-driven menus
over command-line interaction. And by the time Xywrite got around to
that, they were too far behind.
You do know, don't you, that Word's menus can be set to make a
"whooshing" sound as they open and close, right? Surely that counts for
something. :)

MG




Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
> Mark Garvey wrote:
> > In my world today--Thomson corporation, academic and retail
> > publishing--Word is the coin of the realm.
> And it just makes you wonder WHAT people are using in place of the
> brains God--or evolution, or both--gave them. It's as if a carpenter
> exchanged a set of forged-steel, German-made tools for some cheap set
> SE Asian rim made gizmos. For competition to work, there has to be a
> consuming public that knows the difference between quality goods and
> reeking offal. And this we do not have. People just say, "Oh, everyone
> is using it, so it must be good." In a pig's eye.