Wednesday, October 1, 2008

What is WRONG With MS Word?

If you were a kid in the late 80’s, you might remember the whole shebang about Deep Thought beating the super-brain chess champion. You may have also been wondering, like I was, what the big deal was since your home computer could beat the pants off anyone at Solitaire. But, I digress.

The real question is why so many millions could be spent on developing a chess-playing computer when there are no agencies working in a lab somewhere to develop a decent freaking word processing program. Seriously, think about this. If you use Word you may have noticed how frequently wrong it is. You might have had it give you green squiggles when there is no possibility of it being correct in its rude little insinuations.

Where are the government scientists in all of this? How hard could it be, after decades of word processing programs, to create one that actually works well 98 percent of the time? I’ve noticed that Hubble works pretty well most of the time. My car has never broken down. My toaster can make four slices of toast at once. But, a decent word processing program? Apparently that’s just beyond the world’s current level of technology.

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