I think you mean intuition.

I've also heard that their new lines are better, but by definition they don't have a long track record yet to know whether they'll stay that way.

In any case, there are other brands with much more consistent technical track records and much better customer service who also have well-reviewed recent products available.

This is the trouble with cutting corners and mistreating customers and damaging your business reputation as a result: it's a trap that your business will probably never escape, no matter what you do later. Your brand becomes toxic, and as you can see from this thread, no-one's going to shed many tears when your business eventually fails.

Sure, it's a YMMV issue. The trouble is, the people who don't know enough to pick a "safe" default setup as you're suggesting are exactly the ones who most need one.

Linux command prompts make me nervous, and I'm a professional who's been using them for years. Thankfully, I haven't (yet!) really screwed up and lost a lot of stuff, but I know similarly experienced and generally competent people who have. Sometimes all it takes is running a command without a key parameter, and that's as easy as catching the enter key at the wrong time or running a script that doesn't check how many arguments it was given before it starts substituting placeholders.

Not that I disagree with your real point about using a Linux live CD, but please be careful telling people to play around with it because it won't harm anything. Your normal Windows drives probably get mounted by default, and one mistaken command with a cryptic two-letter name could easily destroy data without even prompting for confirmation (rm, dd, etc.).

My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.

Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.

I was talking about vaccines. But irradiated or superheated food is sterile - e.g. freeze dried and some canned goods. They're not unsafe but they are sterile as they don't contain microorganisms.

So it didn't do video over Micro USB then.

I would also like to point out that cases of SIDS rise around the same age as mandatory vaccination. --- there it is, your post immediately disqualified from proper discussion.

Right... because there's nothing that could be done to the albumen between egg and needle that might make it safe and sterile? I think if you look too closely at the food chain from source to table or medicine from source to needle or pill, there will be plenty of things that will gross you out. The question is whether the end products are safe and sterile.

Did anyone here actually assert that, or anything remotely resembling that? I don't see it.

The point here isn't that there is a viable alternative to Word that does these things right now. The point is that it is unfortunate no-one is even trying to write that viable alternative when there are much better ideas out there than what Word does today. If you want a WYSIWYG document preparation tool, you're stuck with Word, including many horrible limitations it comes with that were solved in related fields literally decades ago.

This is a valid point, but I think you nailed it with your qualifier there: "unless somebody comes up with something drastically new". Plenty of related fields offer inspiration for how that drastically new alternative might work, but we're stuck in a rut and not bothering to look at them.

However, I don't think it's true that maturity is the explanation for most of the examples I gave before anyway. It's easy to suggest substantial improvements that could be made in almost every case, and the wish list sites and discussion forums for these software products are full of repeated feature or bug fix requests from people who actually use the software. But as long as those people keep on paying for what is already there, what is the incentive to improve it for them?

No, Google Docs (Drive, whatever) is actually about as far from what I want as you could get and still be talking about software that actually exists. Google Docs is a gimmick, a toy with a poorly designed user interface, barely any features for serious content creation, and no powerful/flexible formatting tools whatsoever.

I have had the misfortune to work on projects where the clients used Google Docs. To my knowledge, not one of those projects was still relying on Google Docs at completion. Everyone switched back to grown-up software, or at least permitted its use for the serious documentation work.

Right. You did read my post before you replied to it, particularly the 90% of it that was about how it's a problem when one technology becomes dominant and people wind up going with that technology not because it's good but because it's the "safe bet"?

Then create them using TeX and send the output using PDF. You've got a much higher chance that everything will still work identically next week, or next year, or next decade with these kinds of tools, because they are designed with reasonably well-specified underlying models.

Of course, in practice having a consistent appearance isn't all you want, and that's why most people won't find the TeX world a useful alternative to Word. It's another instructive example of how some things could be done much better, though.

Then, with respect, the problem here is partly that you're not familiar with what these other technologies can do. In a way, you're making my point for me: people stand by Word believing that it's a good tool, because they haven't seen ideas from different fields where things are done much better.

Some of your specific examples can be done directly in HTML and CSS. Others might be better done using related but more specialised tools such as MathML and SVG, but then in Word they tend to be done by placing a box generated by a separate tool as well (and the tools in Word for things like creating equations are weak, as anyone who has actually tried to do serious mathematical typesetting in Word is painfully aware).

However, my point wasn't to consider specific effects, it was to consider the underlying foundations.

In HTML+CSS, you have a degree of structure in your document, and you can apply styles (and combinations of styles, and context-dependent styles) quite flexibly. There's plenty of room for improvement, but even what's there already makes the stylesheet facilities in typical word processor or DTP software look crude. One paragraph style and one character style, exclusive with all others? Really? And even then, a character style can't change its behaviour depending on which paragraph style it's in, so semantic styling is difficult.

Then there's the general layout model. In HTML+CSS, we can easily position content relative to other content or to the screen/page in various ways, and we can even change those positions depending on the size or other properties of the output medium. Again, there's plenty of room for improvement, but in typical word processors or DTP packages, all you really get is some basic anchoring tools, and everything else has to be done (and redone) by hand.

As a footnote, I want to emphasize that my goal here is not to compare Word with any one specific alternative model, such as HTML+CSS. My point is that there are other, better ways of doing things. HTML+CSS just happens to be a widely-used, practical example of how one type of thing could be done much better.

Given the relatively high number of hideous documents I've seen created by those people and the relatively low number of polished, professional-looking ones, I'm not sure you're making a very compelling argument there.

In any case, there is no reason we couldn't have a WYSIWYG interface that had a powerful, flexible underlying model instead of the crude and dubiously specified mess that most contemporary word processors and DTP packages use.

There is a recurring problem with software development in recent years, where one player has become dominant, the barriers to competition are so high that it has no real challenger for a long time, and the result is stagnation. There are numerous examples: Microsoft Office for business documents and spreadsheets, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, Autodesk applications in the 3D modelling space, IE6 as the classic beloved of web developers everywhere, and as an odd one out just to make the point, Linux if you want an OSS operating system.

There are a few ways out of the trap, but the big problem is that the people making purchasing decisions often aren't interested in assessing the quality or productivity benefits of alternative software, or even able to make informed judgements about those things if they wanted to. No-one ever got fired for buying the market leader, so while they know that the new subscription pricing model will give vendors even less incentive to actually improve anything or the support contracts are probably far more expensive than they're actually worth or the TCO will be horrendous because of usability problems, they'll carry on using these leading products anyway so their careers aren't at risk.

That creates a vicious circle where no-one is willing to invest the staggering amounts of time and money required to build a heavyweight competitor that can effectively challenge an incumbent. Instead, we get open source clones or cheap-and-simple web/mobile apps, which do a good enough job to save some users paying for the heavyweight commercial software, but in most cases offer little real innovation and almost invariably lack the quality and feature set of the established big names. That's why the professionals spending serious money keep buying those big names, and so the cycle continues, with little incentive for software giants like Microsoft to improve their cash cows or innovate with entirely new products.

I think the most likely way out of this in the long term is for a new product to arrive that changes the rules and moves the market. With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content. Probably every programmer reading this routinely uses far more powerful editing, review and collaboration capabilities in their everyday tools. I don't just want Word 2014 any more. I want something that helps me collect, organise and share information in ways that match how we'll be living and working in 2014. And a tool that does that might have a small chance of breaking the Word stranglehold.

His own reputation might be less than exemplary at this point, but I don't see that his ministerial position was particularly relevant here. Any MP, minister or otherwise, is the highest directly elected representative of their constituents in our government system. As a basic principle of representative democracy, it seems very dubious to me that anything like this should be "off limits" to someone in that position, or to people in that position acting collectively by asking questions in Parliament. I can accept reasonable arguments for keeping the specifics of individual cases or ongoing operations on a need-to-know basis and not routinely disclosing them to a few hundred MPs, but not the underlying principles and the existence of systemic practices.