R.I.P. WYSIWYG (Alertbox)
11 Oct 2005The article “R.I.P. WYSIWYG – Results-Oriented UI Coming” published in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column yesterday (maybe today, depending on timezones… I discovered it now, and it’s the 11th here) provides an interesting insight into the changes to Office 12. I’m actually really excited about the release of this software, because it promises to change the face of word processing interfaces, as well as anticipated type quality (for the better, I hope!), and set a benchmark for the rest of the world to aspire to.
OpenOffice.org is, put simply, a poor clone. It doesn’t offer anything particularly innovative, it doesn’t do anything particularly better — with the exception of the formats it uses and its inbuilt PDF and SWF export capability (though these exports are often pretty poor in quality) — but it is free as in speech/beer.
There is, to my knowledge, little in the way of real competition to Office products… perhaps with the exception of iWork to, what, four percent of the computer market?
Hopefully this paradigm shift in the way Office approaches content will mean the proliferation of more applications capable of embracing and extending — with full interoperability — Microsoft’s product. I say this because, at present, any application trying to read Word documents has to kludge around its format (this is true of Word as well… its interoperability with prior versions of the same software is notoriously poor).
Hopefully, a renewed focus on the semantic integrity of documents will enable greater file exchange between platforms (ha ha, as if?) — and also result in a greater ubiquity of sensible user interfaces, that make it manifestly more difficult for users to spend an hour typing for every three hours formatting.
Goodness knows the corporate style guide people are going to want to hug Microsoft when this one comes out. Hopefully it’ll deliver.