My personal gripe with Microsoft is the damage it's done to the field of word processing.
For many years, WordPerfect was the dominant software, not by any fluke, but because it's a good program. People who did word processing for a living were
people.
Then Mr. Gates decided he wasn't making enough money, so he started bundling MS Word (a desktop publishing program that he now presented as a word processing program) with Windows. Unfortunately, WordPerfect's strength is its software, not its marketing, and we all know who wins when monopolistic marketing decides to beat up on a small company selling a superior product.
At about the same time, the exchange of files by email became the norm, and so all those folks who had bought the Windows bundle now used their shiny new MS Word instead of WordPerfect to type their documents.
The result is that Word has taken over the word processing world and people who do word processing for a living are
people.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if Word were a decent program. But it's not. It's very difficult to work with, it's filled with bugs, it's vastly different from any other word processing software (probably because it's
not a word processing program--it's a desktop publishing program), and you have to be nearly an expert to use it (one of the great things about WordPerfect is that all levels of users can use it).
I work at a law firm and spend much of my time each day re-doing MS Word documents that attorneys or secretaries have created because Word is such a difficult and counter-intuitive program. One of the most regularly uttered phrases at my office is "I hate Word." It's just a bad program.
The amount of time wasted trying to fix corrupted Word documents and trying to solve the mysterious surprises that Word foists upon us every day is having a real effect on both the business side of the ledger and the emotional side.
A class action lawsuit sounds good to me--including emotional distress.
