No kidding. Over the weekend I needed to get started on a new writing project. The thought of using Word was very unappealing. I was thinking about how I was always MORE PRODUCTIVE on the Macintosh than the PC. I even thought wistfully about my first word processing system on the Apple II+, Apple P.I.E.. What made all of those more productive was the fact that one did not worry a whole bunch about formatting. You were taught to get the content in, then to come back and make it pretty later. Now, you could do this with Word, but somehow one does not. There is something about all the buttons, the self corrections, and the bars across the top of the screen that just get in the way of "getting content in." I even thought about writing the book I was thinking about in by blog, but that text editor is worse as HTML embedded in something you paste in becomes very unwieldy if you don't remember to paste into notepad first, then copy from Notepad into the blogspot editor. WordStar, once you knew the speed keys, had a feature where you could make all the menus leave the screen and just type on a blank screen. Word use to have speed keys. Maybe they still do. On the Macintosh and in early versions of Word, they made sense. But then they started changing them and it no longer paid to pay attention to what they were. Developers had an interest in my learning to use the features that they thought were cool competitive advantages. The weakness in Open Source is user support, however. If you're not a technical expert and post a question on the newsgroups, even after you've done half a day of research, you are apt to get the glib RTFM answer from some self-appointed expert whose self-esteem depends upon impugning those less technical or less clued in.