> how M$ products in general tend to be unecessarily complicated, poorly 
> documented, resource-inefficient, insecure, and so forth.

TBH I've found MS products to be really well documents, in fact I would say 
better than any other software I've used.  Really, even if you have a 
complicated thing you want to do in Excel, the documentation usually has the 
answer.

> Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
> that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
> read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
> failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

Yeh, they should just use the code from "Open and repair" for the normal 
"Open" operation, and if there were no faults just act silently.  OTOH maybe 
load times would increase significantly for large documents?

> Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
> richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
> can? The people developing OO didn't even have access to a description of 
> the file format; they had to reverse-engineer it. And yet, they somehow 
> did a better job than the people who *designed* that file format. How can 
> that be right??
>
> (Let us not go into the fact that Word costs almost infinity times more 
> than OpenOffice to start with...)

I think you've answered your own questions there anyway, MS has to make 
money so they have all sorts of constraints that OpenOffice doesn't.  If an 
OpenOffice update is delayed by 6 months because they are fixing the 
loading-corrupt-files code, nobody can complain. But if MS attempts to delay 
Office 2013GT by 6 months because they want to fix the loading-corrupt-files 
code, they will likely be forced to release it anyway by the financial 
people.

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