Mac word 6.0

Abstract

When Word 6.0 for the Macintosh first came out, it was loathed. It received absolutely horrid reviews. In my opinion, Mac Word 6.0 had two problems, one real, one political. The real reason was that it was slow and buggy, and that it had arbitrary UI differences from Mac Word 5.0 that required relearning. But there was a political reason too. To understand the political reason, you have to understand that when the Macintosh first came out, it was completely revolutionary, with its WIMP user interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, and ⋯ um ⋯ Pterodactyls? One forgets⋯) and fonts and bitmapped screen and the ability to make a "beep!" sound unlike any computer beep that had ever been heard before. Many software publishers did not quite grok the newness and superiority of the Mac. They just thought it was yet another computer. So they took their old DOS programs and sort of ported them to the Mac, keeping the ridiculous DOS text mode interface and ignoring all the icons and menus and that stuff. These DOS ports were horrible, and Apple was terrified that if this trend continued, the Mac's distinctive GUI advantage would be lost. So Apple evangelists like Guy Kawasaki spread the mantra to the Mac faithful: Ports Are Bad. The only true way of the Mac religion was a completely new, ground-up rewrite to take advantage of the GUI. Mac users were successfully trained by Apple to reject any applications that were just ports from character-mode DOS. The trouble was that they were trained a little bit too well. So when Word for Windows was ported to the Macintosh creating Word 6.0, even though it still had menus and icons and whatnot and was a reasonably Mac-like product, the Mac faithful got wind of what had happened and started chanting their mantra: Ports Are Bad, Ports Are Bad-even though the port was from Windows, not DOS, and Windows was a clone of the Mac in the first place. So that was the political problem. And even though I'm poking fun at it, it's a real problem. You can't make a product successful if it doesn't assuage the real and imagined prejudices of its target audience. That's why nowadays Microsoft has a whole business unit in Silicon Valley that makes Macintosh software and they always try to include at least one feature in the Mac version that the Windows version doesn't have, to keep on the Mac acolytes' good side even if there's something irrational about it. The vocal Mac community still chants regularly about how they want native, ground-up applications for the Mac, not plain ports, which, by the way, hurts them a lot more than it helps them, because it scares away software publishers who might have been able to afford a port but do not have the resources to do a whole new product⋯ but that's a different story. One of the reasons I loved reading Rick's account of Mac Word 6.0 is that it reminded me of the early 1990s, when I worked at Microsoft, when every decision was carefully taken after much debate and deliberation by very, very smart people, and yet, to the outside peanut gallery throwing stones, to mix a metaphor, those decisions looked stupid and incompetent. That's the way it always is. Design decisions involve extremely hard trade-offs, especially when you have limited memory and CPU power, and it's easy to criticize the result without understanding all the factors that the programming team had to consider. So journalists writing reviews of our products have fairly legitimate complaints about how the software behaves, and any attempt to explain that behavior can only be understood by another programmer. Everyone involved, fortunately, had stock options and now owns a very nice house on Mercer Island, another loft in downtown Seattle, a Bentley convertible, and a big boat. So don't feel too sorry for them. - Ed.