I was talking to a guy a couple of weeks ago about the evolution of programming languages. I mentioned to him about what a huge change there was between Microsoft C Compiler version 5.0 and 6.0. He was like..."you mean from Visual Studio 5 to 6?" and I was like "how long have you been out of short trousers??"
Ok...I get that a lot these days. Everyone is younger than me.
Microsoft introduced the capability to work with Windows in the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler version 6.0. It was so incredibly complicated to launch a window that it really didn't seem at all worth learning how the hell to do it. If my memory does not fail me entirely, they introduced Visual Studio after the C/C++ Compiler version 7.0. Visual programming was something of a revelation...
But that's another day's story. I'm not fundamentally anti-Microsoft. I think they've made a few really good products. I just think it's a shame that they're so inconsistant in everything they do.
I use MS Word all the time. I used to use a couple of DTP packages to prepare docs to be able to get the layout flexibility I wanted, but now I can actually do pretty much all I need to within Word. I tried using OpenOffice and it is a total train-wreck by comparison.
I also use MS Excel all the time. It is an extremely powerful tool without which we would have a hard time running the business. That's no exaggeration, because we use it for so many different things. I tried importing a few of my general purpose spreadsheets into OpenOffice...it cried its little eyes out...it willingly donned the gimp suit and stuffed a little red ping pong ball into its mouth and offered me some ripe pink rump...it failed...
I had a run down on KeyNote on the Mac the other day. I liked it. I liked the feel of it, and I really liked that the presentations did not automatically look like PowerPoint...I use PowerPoint quite a bit but I never really like the end result much.
It made me think about the MS Office packages. I can now draw a box on the screen in just about any of the MS Office component packages. There are also a couple of packages that are specifically written to help me draw a box on the screen (Visio, PowerPoint, Publisher...I think they canned the other one...Photoshare? something like that...not counting that total waste of space MS Paint...). Every single one of them works a different way! Why can't they just write a drawing/painting plugin and let all the apps use the same interface?
They must spend so much money having separate development teams maintaining all those different products, as if we (the user) gave a damn!
