rant whine 'splain espouse: How to avoid Microsoft products

Saturday, May 15, 2004

How to avoid Microsoft products

Well, when you're a web developer and graphic designer, you can never totally steer clear of the Microbehemoth, but...there are ways.

I still have to test new website designs in Exploder eventually, but I develop using Safari these days. Willhelm was right when he told me about two years ago that it rocked. But I had no idea until I switched to Jaguar last year, and fell in love with tabbed browsing. So much less window clutter.

And the bane of my existence is MS Word. That bloatware is responsible for more crashes, hangs, hugely overinflated document sizes, utterly unnecessary attachments, printing headaches, cross-platform fuckups, and just plain blasted annoyance than any program I've had the displeasure of using in the past 14 years, and so I avoid using it at any cost. Which is of course impossible. Because everydamnbody uses it, everydamnbody sends their .doc files at you and expects you to be able to read them, and everybody thinks MS Word is on everybody else's computer because, well, hey, doesn't it just come with your computer?

No. And it's expensive.

So I use this. Fuck you, Microsoft. Choke on your bloatware.