Ribbons of chaos flummox even Word lovers

I’m not a big fan of scifi author and computer columnist Jerry Pournelle these days due to his politics, his abrasiveness and his clouded approach to reviewing new stuff. I used to like his lengthy columns for Byte magazine in print because he was one of the only people back then with some attitude, some writing ability and the room to ruminate. But all that is long gone with the demise of paper Byte under the onslaught of the Internet and the spread of blogging.

But I come not to praise or bury Pournelle. Rather, he’s begun using the upcoming version of Microsoft Word for Windows and even he, a huge fan of the program and pretty serious fanboy for Microsoft generally, is finding the wacky new Word “ribbon” that replaces most menus and toolbars to be “sheer hell.” I warned about the tremendous cost of reorganizing everything from the ground up last year when this mess was first announced. Pournelle said the program gets easier to use over time, but there is “no simple answer” to whether the improvements outweigh the loss of productivity and head aches. A week later, he wrote that he had “so far seen no compelling reason to convert from Office 2003 to Office 2007.”

p.s. More bad news? Looks like the upcoming 2007 Mac version of Office rewritten to run natively on Intel processors will could also have some form of the be waving the ribbons of chaos.