[Pc_Support] Microsoft still caters to people who write letters, not books ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

The New York Times had an article today about the current bug
squashing status in both Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 2007.
  RE:  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/technology/09vista.html

In reality, let's fact it, the two products are still designed for
people who write letters, not books much less have serious document
and factory-floor product backends.  Working a several large, but
still American industry powerhouses myself, Office on the factory
floor is still very much a _joke_ and has 0% automation.

One of my favorite quotes was at the very end ...

     "If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it's
      very high," he [Ben Canning] said. "There is a small minority that
      crash all the time, and they hate us, and we want to help."

Can I get a "bullshit"?!  Mr. Canning knows, as everyone else who
attempts to use MS Word in a _production_ environment knows, that MS
Office -- through 11 (2003) -- is a letter writing program.  It has
_no_ strict, internal documentation typset or language, and compounds
meta-data upon meta-data as you mark-up text with_out_ any "clean up."

As a result, as you use more sectioning, figures, tables and other
meta-data-filled objects, they compound and compound upon one another.
 MS Word slows to a crawl and, at some point, Windows itself will
detect it is "unresponsive."  People like to say it's memory leaks but
it's not.  It's the result of the meta-data of objects in the document
applied over and over without any control.

Until MS Word is fundamentally changed from its "letter writing"
aspect to a _true_ documentation system, this will not be solved.  Mr.
Canning knows it.  Mr. Gates knows it.  And God knows Microsoft's own,
internal documentation team knows it -- because they do _not_ use MS
Word.  Because it was _never_ designed for such.

Microsoft was supposed to really adopt a true documentation backend
with XML for Office 12 (2007).  But they said that for Office 11
(2003) as well, and what did we get?  0% XML for its own structure,
only add-in/extensions for 3rd party.  But the reality is that from
what I've seen and read, Office 12 is _not_ a true back-end re-design,
and the XML is still _not_ native or 1:1 to internal.

It's in Microsoft's own benefit to make good on XML.  Not because it
will offer interoperability, but because XML -- or _any_ back-end
documentation format -- will actually get Microsoft to "clean up" how
it handles meta-data by dealing with tag layout, reformat and
re-format / clean up.  They haven't to date, and it's no better than
your typical Javascript/Ajax HTML editor.

Not something for writing books much less can be automated on a
factory floor.  At the most, you have to write a serious amount of
code and other, _100%_external_ systems to "extract" from it via its
"fat" client -- when it doesn't crash as a result.