No, blame anyone who uses anti-competitive tactics such as this. WordPerfect did the same thing against MS in Word for DOS.
You can use your copy of MS Office until your machine falls apart.
In an isolated instance, yes. In a world where everybody else is upgrading and you need to be able to read their documents, no.
And since you guys argue that you can do excellent binary conversion
Excellent, but not foolproof. Only Microsoft knows how to perfectly translate an Office document.
No need. Word handles it just fine.
Let's both start complicated color documents, you in Word and me in InDesign. See whose comes out better and faster -- bets are on InDesign because it was built as a design application, not a text processor with some design abilities tacked on. InDesign is an extra cost, but contrasted with the slower work and lower quality of Word, it pays for itself pretty quickly.
And if you're doing long documents, nothing compares to FrameMaker. I could have saved my company several times the cost of FrameMaker when doing a very long, complicated document (headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, references, diagrams, screenshots, etc.) last year if they'd let me use it.
When given Word as a hammer, everybody thinks every publishing job is a nail.
You and 1L should sync up. He seems to be under the impression that the OO thesaurus is state-of-the-art.
We're allowed differing opinions. I like the Word thesaurus I use at work better. But that's not enough to get me using Word at home, because I rarely use it. I stayed awake in English class.
but it doesn't talk to MS Exchange Server and, therefore, it will have no corporate adoption.
Again, you use Microsoft-specific abilities to claim Microsoft is superior. "It's not Outlook so it can't be as good as Outlook." Also, your "smackdown" is old, pre-Thunderbird 1.0, meaning it's missing a lot of things favorable to Thunderbird, which in version 1.0 is already the equivalent or better when compared to a seven year old application.
And you can configure Exchange to do POP or IMAP4.
They're too busy floundering around, copying features from Outlook that have been around for years.
They're doing PIM and calendaring features you'd expect, plus more that they believe will eclipse those in Outlook. You know, there were calendaring applications around before Outlook.
Dude, your knowledge of software history is pretty limited. Word was a graphically based word processor years before WordPerfect ever made the move. WordPerfect wasn't even close to being a model for Word.
It's pretty damn good. Word was written for DOS in '83, with a GUI-based version coming out for the Mac a couple of years later, and a GUI-based version for the PC when a usable Windows finally came. The DOS-based Word was by far the inferior in both quality and marketshare to WordPerfect.
The Windows-based Word won because Microsoft knew all of the APIs for Windows that they hadn't released to third-party developers like WordPerfect, which was why the first WordPerfect for Windows was quite unstable (I remember, I used it). By virtue of being the Windows creators, Microsoft also gave itself a head start. Word already had marketshare by the time WordPerfect was able to reverse-engineer the APIs and put out a decent version of WordPerfect for Windows.
There was another problem though: Microsoft used many of WordPerfect's reserved keys (which people had memorized to the point of motor memory) as reserved keys for Windows. Not good.