New ideas capture peoples imagine, no doubt about it. But this struck a chord when I re-visited J-Walks old blog.

As you might expect, you’ll find lots of predictable comments and jokes by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. But there are a few interesting comments. For example:

Someone need to start OVER and rethink what a word processor needs to do. Basics like multi level numbering are impossible to teach users how to do. These apps are truly dinosaurs and we need a new killer app word processor suitable for writing books, html and pdf documentation including table of contents, indexes, appendices and normal stuff you find in documents.

John was quoting from a slap dash post.

I don’t know if John agreed with this or if he was pointing it out as a rubbish comment – John? (well someone in Tucson is reading this blog!)
Anyway, I kinda agree. Not totally, I’m sure you can teach people to do multi level numbering, but yeah have you ever used words index or table of contents functions in anger?

When Binder [1 2] still shipped with office it never really worked, but was a great idea. And that’s the thing. MS dropped Binder, why? - because “usability tests”, shown no one used it. Of course no one did. It did nothing but crash ever time you looked at the ruddy thing, but hell I still tried to. You see an 80 page Word documents sucks! It sucks, it sucks, case closed. Ok, ok.

What’s my point? I’m not sure, partly that I wish MS would properly correct and improve the existing feature of their products, and I guess Office 12 is trying to some extent to do this. Oh, it’s 01:30 am I’m listen to BGM and I have another Paragon model to run before I can leave work, I guess I’m a bit grumpy!