Microsoft Ditches Works
I was never a fan of Microsoft Works. It was just too different from Office in everything from interface to file formats. And that was probably the point -- make it so unlike Office that you had to actually have Office to get anything done.
Microsoft finally gave Works what it long deserved: retirement. In its place, and only available on new PCs starting next year, is Office Starter 2010.
Starter has only Word and Excel, and those versions are reduced-function (which could be good or bad depending on what functions get pulled out). I'd actually like to see these apps and, if I like 'em, to see them hosted in the cloud.
My favorite word processor of all time was from New Horizons and ran on the Amiga. It was graphical, clean, fast and ultra easy. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't see the need for more than a handful of fonts -- unless, of course, you're art directing one of my magazines (and many of those fonts are custom-built). Starter Word could be perfect for me, at least on a netbook.
Do crazy fonts and feature overload drive you batty? Let it all out at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on October 19, 2009