What is it that keeps people using the same software even if they know it is a pile of manure? Laziness? Familiarity? Unwilling to change?

Today, my partner was asked to make a design in Powerpoint to ensure the final presentation was in house style. Being no Powerpoint expert my partner struggled to achieve quite simple things which had they been done in another package, would have taken moments. What matters if the presentation is made from Adobe Acrobat rather than Powerpoint? Especially when the resulting file from Powerpoint measured 8.5MB while the same as a PDF would be a miserly few tens of kilobytes. But no, the client insisted they had to use Powerpoint so the work of a few moments actually took hours to achieve and looked nowhere near as good. In any case, don’t most people turn off after the first Powerpoint slide. They certainly seem to from the glazed expressions and stifled yawns I’ve seen through my own heavy-lidded eyes.

The same is with Word which for some reason completely beyond my understanding has been adopted around the world as a default. Back in the 1980’s Microsoft produced a neat word processor called Write which blossomed into Word 5 on the Mac at a time when Windows 3 was still waiting to be stolen… er…styled on OS2. Both editors were fast and lean with all the features current text editing requires and more beside. Plus both were relatively intuitive to use.

Why has Microsoft continued to ruin a perfectly good product so we end up with the pile of pooh they call Word? It is unwieldy, unintuitive, prone to failures and from what I see from files I receive, hardly anybody needs any of the features it has, let alone use them with any skill. Text is tabbed about, with long runs of spaces to get lines to turn over and repeated paragraph returns to make text move to the next page. Doesn’t anyone in the UK know how to switch on English spelling and DIN page sizes? And don’t get me started on Word tables and stylesheets.

It’s not just Microsoft who are guilty but if they haven’t been able to write a decent word processor, spreadsheet and presentation package after all these years, I dread to think what mess underpins Vista. Adobe, another monolithic publisher, are just as bad with Illustrator. As the inventors of Postscript you would think they would make the best Postscript drawing package but sadly not. Printing problems caused by Illustrator files are still a regular feature. For years rival Freehand gave Illustrator a run for the money, arguably winning time after time. At the last version Freehand offered features Illustrator still hasn’t matched and had moved into challenging page make-up applications as well.

Eventually Adobe bought Macromedia, Freehand’s then publisher, burying their main rival (although they say they will continue to develop it based upon customers needs), to get their hands on Dreamweaver and Flash, which like Freehand, were better than Adobe’s offerings. This is the second time Adobe have owned Freehand, previously acquired with their purchase of Aldus when Adobe were forced by the US FTC to return Freehand to its creator Altsys.

Quark Inc. for a decade had the publishing world dangling from their strings. There were rivals but nothing Quark couldn’t better. Customer service became arrogant, the product, QuarkXPress, grew long in the tooth as Quark took their eyes off the ball. Adobe took up the challenge and created inDesign. It’s not great and certainly not bug free but the design world took to it in droves meaning Quark have lost what they thought was their monopoly. They have recently improved their product and now bundle a flash-like animation editor but it all seems a bit pedestrian when compared with the real thing. Plus, Quark’s loyal desktop publishing customers don’t really need the whistles and bells that have been bolted on. After all, who in their right mind would make a web site in QuarkXPress unless forced to? Come to that, who in their right mind would use QuarkXPress to create books, magazines and graphic designs unless they were forced to?

Bah! Humbug!