Re: us

["R Tennenbaum"]

>Rafe magnanimously recommended Amy Virshup's article on
>XyWrite and this list even though she misspelled his name;
>he was right to do so.

She didn't, Nathan, I use "Ray" in my byline. I hope I was right to
recommend it, but of course it seems a bit of a mixed bag: well-written
and well-researched, mostly encouraging, but at some key points
ordinary.

Amy's to be commended for her research, and when she's describing
people and events I think she's good-humored and not unfairly ironic.
It's her effort to characterize "us" -- to find something that unifies
"us" apart from the simple fact we use XyWrite -- that bugs me a
little.

Obviously we're not going to take to be referred to, even in the most
lighthearted or good-natured way. as a cult of zealous early Christian
dinosaurs, or whatever. (If it's not worn out, btw, the metaphor of
software advocates as religious fanatics needs something considerably
more compelling to work.) Of course it puts us in sort of an odd
position, but a typical one: take issue, by saying "you know, you
really don't need 5-1/4" diskettes to load XyWrite" or, "there's
absolutely nothing about XyWrite except one weird buglet that makes it
hard to install" -- and you end up coming across as a nitpicky
dinosaur cultist.

But leaving that aside, the story lacks an understanding not only that
many alternatives such as Xywrite not only exist, but that there's no
reason for them not to. Or shall we say, to the extent the storyline
understands this is against a backdrop of Word as the lingua franca, as
it were, of word processors -- and everyone else as some sort of
peculiar Luddite, zealot, or barbarian. Of course, only a Luddite,
zealot, barbarian, or maybe a Unix freak would think that -- or maybe
someone who might just insert a few Xy installation disks into the new
laptop instead of just blindly using the MS Word that came bundled with
it.

I don't mean to be harsh, Amy -- your story had some very good things
in it. But as far as we're concerned, Xy is simply a very special
application which works for our very specialized purposes -- and btw,
there are many many people out there using Xywrite who have nothing to
with this list -- I've seen them running Xywrite on laptops in press
rooms. The only things Xywriters on this list have in common --
believe me -- is that we don't feel any compelling reason to switch
over to Word, we don't give a bleep what Esther Dyson uses, and most of
us probably think it's ludicrous that zillions of users use Word simply
because they were too lazy to insert a few old Xy installation
diskettes into a disk drive. 

I don't really care about the insidious pagans^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h
knowledgeable, savvy, cutting-edge information workers who use Word --
I use Word when I have to correspond with them. The *only* reason I
express any concern in forums such as this is that I'd like to know
that I'll be able to use Xywrite for the next x years; I'm pretty sure
I will be, some way or another, but this latest news that MS is
discontinuing DOS emulation (what possible purpose does this serve?)
is pretty discouraging. I confess that MS domination is a very
frightening thought to me, if only because 1) obviously it very seldom
makes things better for anyone -- except MS; and 2) it is harder and
harder to resist.

But -- on the whole, altogether it was a good story.

-Rafe T.

raphaelt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.ray-field.com