XyWrite III+ in WinXP

[peregrine@xxxxxxxx]

My experience was much the same, Mark, except that our newsrooms had been standardized on a slightly customized version of XyWrite for about a decade. In fact, the newspaper I wrote for then in Charleston, W.Va. was owned by Thomson. My eventual conclusion was that IT people are inclined always to do what works best for them, not for the end user. I still lobby against that to this day in writing and web design.



I still enjoy the facility of XyWrite 4 with the (often amazing) benefits of U2 in the writing process. I then import Xy's ASCII into whatever the circumstances demand ... usually Pagemaker, In Design or Quark XPress, but sometimes Dreamweaver or another HTML publisher.



For me, it's a very functional kind of workflow. I seem to think and write better using XyWrite, but I use none of XyWrite's printing functions. I proofread only for content in XyWrite, proofread format in the WYSIWYG publishing program and then turn it over to others to do their editing and tweaking. The right software for the right process.



We converted from Xy to Word because Word was included in the operating system and because the "power users" among us could troubleshoot XyWrite better than our tech support people, whose job requirements eventually required Microsoft certification. (Microsoft-certified techies don't play well with software built outside of Redmond. I think it's in the training.) So the end-user's superior knowledge of the program simply made the tech support people look bad. Usefulness, the program's most desirable quality, was one key to its downfall in my little universe.



Jeff



__________

Mark Garvey wrote:



>>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 <<


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