Sitting here in Denver Airport, I think I have finally lost my faith in technology innovation. And the reason? That fiendish creation of the Gates empire, Microsoft Word.
Like a good believer, I have persevered with my faith in technology innovation as a driver of social progress. There have been niggling doubts for sure. But I’ve held fast – until now. While struggling this evening with yet another a MS Word document that didn’t survive the traumatic transfer from a PC to (horror of horrors) a Mac, everything become clear – the promise of technology innovation is nothing but a myth, created to feed our insatiable desire for change.
Eighteen years ago, I was writing my thesis – on a Mac – using an early incarnation of Microsoft Word. I typed, and what appeared on the screen matched what came out of the printer. I added equations – complex ones at that. I included textbook-quality diagrams. And my final thesis looked as good as anything I’ve produced since.
The system worked – it made my life easier. And it worked from a single 3 1/2 inch disk (remember those?) that contained the Mac’s operating system, the word processor, and all the documents I was working on.
So what has changed in the intervening eighteen years? How has technology innovation improved my life as I type away?
These days, I type into the latest version of Word, and the system hangs up on me. I try adding equations, and can’t get the formatting right. I attempt to include diagrams, and the program places them everywhere but where I want them to go. I open documents from PC-using colleagues, to be faced with text and images in places they were never meant to be.
And all this from a program that now takes up well over 50 times the disk space of its predecessor, and needs a super-computer to run on.
So much for progress.
But it gets worse.
People actually use this program. They take it’s flaws in their stride. They go to great lengths to explain how, when things go wrong, you are the problem. They enthuse over the thousand and one features that contribute precisely nothing to good writing. They even change their work habits to match the program’s foibles.
In other words, they adapt to fit the technology.
This I find deeply disturbing. People, it seems, don’t strive to do things better. They strive to do things different. And technology innovation gives them the opportunities they so avidly seek – even if it makes life harder.
How else do you explain a society that, in eighteen years, has so thoroughly embraced a product that enables them to do less for more?
Of course, my judgment might be slightly clouded by the current dogs-dinner of a document sitting in front of me that I’m expected to read and edit. Maybe technology innovation really does improve people’s lives sometimes. Maybe I should hold off on forming the Tech Innovation Unbeliever’s Association for now.
But it does make you wonder whether we’re addicted to the change that technology innovation brings, rather than the progress it promises.
And if we are, I wonder what the treatment is – tech innovation rehab?
I can see the queues forming now for the Microsoft Word Recovery Center.
Written in Ommwriter – which is not made by Microsoft
{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
‘In other words, they adapt to fit the technology.’
Worth contemplating – are we generally better at technology innovation that then requires ‘uptake’ (and adapation), as opposed to developing technologies to meet immediate needs?
Of course I was being tongue in cheek here, but I do think that successful technology innovation is market driven – the trouble is, the market reflects what people want (or can be convinced they want), not necessarily what is useful or beneficial. A profound ability to make bad choices is a defining feature of humans it seems at times!
I have absolutely depended on Microsoft to come out with new products so I could make a decent living for the last 20 years or so. You see, I have no other marketable skills. My only real ability is adapting to and learning about new software before other people. That and I’m really, really good with Google.
I must admit though I don’t think Word, in particular, has improved much since the days you could run it off of a floppy.
Hi Kevin!
Ah, I missed this rather perverse up-side of tech innovation – the more things that are invented that don’t work, the more jobs are created to fix the problems. Pure genius!
Y’all should have gone to iwork in the first place! Great interface, reliability, total compatibility with all word docs. Converted to mac 18 months ago, first bought Word for Mac which crashed all the time and drove me bats for £300. Then went back and got iwork for £69 and all has been happy in computer land since.
So like all recent cult converts I am a bit over enthusiastic, but agree that there is something more customer focused about it than MS, but maybe that’s is just anti-capitalist PR infiltrating my brain.
Actually, and Microsoft should be blushing shamefully here, I ended up using iWork Pages to open and read the MS Word Document that I was working on, because it retained the formatting better than the program the document was designed for!
Your frustration is common and understandable but to judge the ability of technology to truly progress by the yardstick of Microsoft Word (or pretty much any of their products) is comparable to judge the possible constructive role of government in society by the results of the Bush administration. Possible but probably not the best yardstick
There are plenty of alternatives. If you were to use some of the wordprocessor alternatives such as openoffice thet run on Windows, Macs, or Linux systems and save their files in a vendor-neutral data-standard you will not experience these kind of problems. These systems are fully compatible with MS-Office (to the limit were different versions of MS-office are compatible with itself).
The point is: there are solutions for this and most of them are free (in both sesnses of the word). They just don’t come from Microsoft, and probably never will.
An insightful post indeed.
Ommwriter is a “flourishing” piece of software and it brings interesting perspectives on paths innovation might follow: it is creative, almost “organic” so to say … it runs away from the race for technological empowerment and the “harder, faster, better, stronger” myth…
It is to me a typical example of how innovation should include many more factors, far from only technological improvements.
One thing I do find interesting in the comments this post has stimulate is that tech failure clearly stimulates tech innovation – OmmWriter, Linux and OpenOffice are just three examples. And yet (with the exception of Linux perhaps), there are huge hurdles to these innovations hitting the mainstream – in tech evolution, it obviously isn’t good enough just to be better than the competition!
Isn’t that more to do with Microsoft monopoly status than the quality and innovation of competitors?
Most likely. But that raises the question of why the monopoly in the first place, and whether this is the norm rather than the exception with widespread technology adoption? (Am now anticipating replies citing that old chestnut Betamax, and a whole host of other technically “superior” innovations that never made it!).
I feel you about the diagrams thing – even if you add a picture box or whatever they’re called and paste a diagram in I still have to spend 10 minutes looking for where it has magically pasted in my document which is never where I want it either and usually halfway off the page with only a mm showing its location.
It’s funny how Microsoft embeds itself in the deep psyche of necessity. A friend who is waiting delivery of an iMac system that comes with iWork installed, is already talking about that software as a ‘make-do’ until they can get Office for Mac installed. Why?! While I was typing up my SciCom assignments last year, I used Word for Mac (on my Mac obviously) and it was the only software that let me down; at one point prompting manual back-up to sticks every 10 mins. – such was the paranoia it induced. I’ve also had grief transferring Word-generated stuff into Wordpress. (Btw – I typed my thesis on a Sinclair QL, complete with tape MICRODRIVES! – devices whose technical innovation was exceeded only by their unreliability.)
And absolutely, I’m sure folk are hypnotized by technological change without honestly analyzing the benefit. Dare I even mention the iPhone: for some no doubt a genuine productivity aid, but for others, I’m sure, just a small piece of compensatory sparkle in a dull job. Look at cameras; you probably don’t need 18 Mpixel unless you plan to sell your pictures (although I do think camera tech. innovation has facilitated new photographic talent – to a point). Plus, the electronics have reached the point where the lens is the weak link anyhow.
So in the broad, we are locked into a mindset that wrongly says it’s a good thing to shorten the innovation/renewal cycle in all things, all the time. Plus, many folk have forgotten what is really valuable to them.
Would love a historian’s perspective on whether technology innovation has ultimately contributed to the downfall of previous civilizations, because it ends up pandering to human desires that are not conducive to progress…
I realize this is aging material now, as far as it related to your fits w/ MS Word, and I just wanted to speak up and “relate”, because the issue.. okay, I got here by googling [+"the promise of technology" +myth], so I’m glad to find a human discussion of sorts… “The Fix” to problems nowadays being a great deal of the learning curve. My academic background has hovered around History and historical analysis, but do we really need historical examples to make predictions? because some days if I knew it would be volatile enough not to create too much more work, I’d light fire to Rome, myself… as-in “Nah… screw it… this is ALL wrong….” and that being intuition expressed and likely similar feelings you had w/ formatting and lock-ups…. But have you tried…. ???
Makes me wanna punch people in the mouth sometimes… 
not serious, well….. anyway… I do think it panders to our desires for variety and change of scenery in general… but that’s the face-value aspects that you’re referring to so my fears and suspicions arise when I see PR and Marketing campaigns pushing ideas that don’t seem to even help the industries that they are promoting in the mid-term, and makes me wonder what is “really” in store for us in the future…. not so far away… I’m being general, but I’m a DJ and have been for 19 years, which is what I did w/ my liberal education… 
but talk about reward… what was tough enough before has been rendered stupid, w/ active PR to stomp out any traditional ideas that have served to protect the trade and activity of it…. so NOW, after studying it for some time see the “promise of technology” being used as a tool to do more than just sell new wares and manufactured electronic goods. A civilization doesn’t have to fall down for life as you know it (in good ways) to change drastically enough to make it not worth the effort to be “creative”… and as long as the right monopoly is in place, the entity behind all that could care f-ing less what your frustrations are… because enough will accept it and toot its horn not knowing the f-ing difference… they repeat exactly what they’ve been fed. Thank you… for having a hard enough day to mention it…. I think you’re correct… what to do?? Shit…. Go back to ways that work… and get better at those… I totally agree… well… you weren’t saying we should go back but the promise is a lie. It’s not a real promise… it’s a gamble that often is not complained about… a “shell game”.
See, I knew this more than a decade ago. Even when I was working in high tech PR one of the [large company that you have referenced in your post] said to me, ‘Ruth, most people have more software now than they will ever need or will ever learn how to use.’ That was in 1999, I believe. His mother was still happily running Multimate on an ancient laptop and kept asking him if she should change to something else. His standard response was, it does what you want it to do, yes? So no. I tried to tell this story as a joke when I returned to the office and the 23-year-olds I was working with looked at me blankly. Finally they said, ‘Multimate?’
I was also lucky enough to catch an interview with a reference librarian around that time who talked about how stressful it was having to constantly learn new software ‘routines’ just to keep doing the jobs they were already quite expert at doing. I certainly knew that one, having been through who knows how many iterations of WordPerfect, the word processing standard that was driven out of business by [large company referenced in your post].
Bottom line: we have enough software. Far too much of software development is about pushing product, not about solving problems. Improvements in Word in particular have always been incremental, not dramatic. I’m not sure there have been any improvements in the other pieces of the Office suite offerings in the last decade. Certainly none to write home about. And more disturbing, the trend now seems to be away from inter-operability and cross-platform compatability again, which is, to put it mildly, disheartening.
Ruth, Microsoft didn’t kill MultiMate and WordPerfect, they killed themselves with horrible new versions that alienated their loyal followings. Microsoft had a decent alternative that worked and ate their lunch, but the makers of MM and WP had only themselves to blame.
History is riddled with products that were technically great but market failures and also with technically deficient products that were hugely successful.
I think what is really at work in all of this is the human need to fiddle around with stuff, even stuff that works. Sometimes we make things better in the process, sometimes we break them. Sometimes in our ill advised fiddling around, we have great eureka! moments. These are the results we look back on later and call them great innovations.
Kevin – you’re leaving out the bundling issue entirely, and I don’t think you can do that. WordPerfect may well have stumbled and lost its way, but it had a lot of help along the way. As for Multimate, my point was that even Microsoft product managers in the late 1990s, when they were being honest and had abstained from drinking the KoolAid for a while, admitted that software was being produced at a rate far faster than it was needed. Sort of like the two-year supply of butter that was stockpiled in Denmark at one point. Except software doesn’t get stockpiled – it gets pushed and pushed hard. Software companies were the best thing to happen to PR firms since sliced bread because they believed in its value.
Since Office XP, all the newer versions have been downhill: features dropped, menus moved around and hidden etc. It’s like they’re trying to aggravate us (or have contempt for their users).
Andrew- Transcend the OS debacle! Go Google Docs, all the way. Upload any file and it just works, and then it lives in the cloud. And it’s free. You can access it on any machine that has a web browser and an internet connection, and it works exactly the same. Then you can share with whoever.
Not to sound like an ad, but it changed the way I work completely. I work on a Mac at work and a PC at home- I also have a netbook I carry everywhere with a different flavor of Windows. Everything works exactly the same across all platforms. All your collaborators need is an internet connection. It’s stored off-site so you never need to worry about corrupted files. Check it out.
As far as technology is concerned, my philosophy is that unless the software you are using to do your work is agile, robust, flexible and intuitive, it’s worthless. Apple and Microsoft are out of the software game as far as I’m concerned. They’ve missed the boat. This is 2010! Our future is in the cloud.
Thanks Nowell,
Sounds like I should put my metaphorical goggles and raincoat on and join the cloud crowd
(only fly in the ointment is all those collaborators who haven’t seen the light yet!)
I think one can make an economic argument that software in general doesn’t possess the qualities of a product that can be sold in a free market. Therefore, attempts to do so tend to result in market failures, i.e. monopolies. The monopoly software sellers will do what they can to protect their position, through control of formats, etc. They don’t have the motivation to improve their product that a seller in a real competitve market would have. The software market is responding to market failures as markets always do, through other models of developing, distributing and profiting from software.
The value of innovation is rarely questioned. But is innovation always beneficial? Good intentions aside, innovation as a historical force doesn’t always create jobs. It sometimes destroys them. But what of broader societal benefits? A recent book by Stanley Joel Reiser (Technological Medicine: The Changing World of Doctors and Patients, Cambridge, 2009) suggests that, at least in the world of healthcare, innovation is not always an unalloyed good. Innovation, based on Reiser’s study of several medical innovations, produces winners and losers and the winners might not always be the patients. Technology for its own sake can, as Reiser argues in the case of some medical technologies technologies, lead to unexpected outcomes and moral dilemmas.
Thanks Patrick – it seems to take a brave person these days to stand up and question our belief in innovation as a force for good! Will definitely follow up the reference to Stanley Joel Reiser’s book.
I know I’m late to this party, but I wanted to point out (probably unpopularly) is that what you’re trying to do is thoroughly obsolete. You want your software to help you compose epistles in hardcopy form. If ever there was a transitional use for technology, that’s one. Sure, it’s a popular one, but technology innovation isn’t about making the Pony Express move faster. It’s about obsoleting the Pony Express in favor of other solutions that better achieve your end goal.
If your end goal is writing something that will end up on paper, then no – technology hasn’t necessarily been your friend. (Although I will point out that self-publishing has become remarkably easy in the past few years, and integration of pictures into documents has also become easier.) If your goal is disseminating information or documenting knowledge, then you’ll see that Word is a legacy technology that has already joined the smoke signal, the carrier pigeon, and the telegraph in history.
Hi Scott,
Admittedly, my benchmark for technology innovation was rather suspect – there’s both software that achieves what Word doesn’t in terms of translating concepts into hard copy, and software that transcends the hard-copy step in communicating information. So in a more nuanced and realistic perspective on technology innovation, you can argue that there are some things that we do better now. But the dynamic surrounding the mainstream adoption of technologies – and MS Word isn’t anything if not mainstream – still fascinates me. Why do the majority of people make the choices and put up with the inconveniences they do?
On one hand I hear you, but on the other… well, I only use what I need at any given time in MS Word. Which means maybe 20% of its 1000+ bugs/features. But when I have to get into things like paragraph levels, I feel your pain. My main peeve there: why, when I indent or outdent paragraphs, don’t their level numbers automatically change? Sorry, this is major for users, and should be minor for Microsoft to fix.
Oh, and on a related note: “They take it’s flaws in their stride” should be “They take its flaws in their stride”.
i.e., human grammar checking still required.
This guy is obviously an idiot. How about you take a computer class Andrew and learn how to use ms word.
Right click the diagram, hit formatting, and change its layout to square. Let’s you move it anywhere lol. (word 2003)
For word 2007 and 2010 just look at the toolbars and find formatting and do the same thing.
You idiot. Lol.