>> 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.

Well, there are plenty of open-source projects that have *no* 
documentation at all. OTOH, most of what M$ provides leaves much to be 
desired. (E.g., I managed to find a KB article explaining how to use the 
Recovery Console. Except that, actually, it just duplicates, word for 
word, the terse command help built into the Recovery Console...)

In general, if you're trying to do something simple (e.g., how do I 
change the IE start page?), the documentation tells you. If you're 
trying to do anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends to 
not help at all... I guess this says something about their intended 
target audience?

>> 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?

I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash 
all of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...

>> 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.

OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 
whereas M$ can afford to hire the brightest people in the business and 
pay them to work on the problem 9-5 every single day. Given the hugely 
superior resources available to M$, you'd *think* they could produce a 
product that works properly under forceeable circumstances...

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