Apr 24, 2022·edited May 1, 2022Liked by Steven Sinofsky
When I was a PM on Excel talking to KirkG about a feature, he gave me a quote that I'll never forget, "Tools/Options is where spineless program managers put their feature when they can't make a *$#^&% decision." I smile ever time I consider the truth of that statement.
One early step in the journey of task panes was with JulieLar when she was still in DevDiv. If I remember right, she was already designing task panes for developer tools. I remember having having early conversations with her about how they might be used in Outlook in 1996ish?
Another big influencer of more text in the interface (for which task panes and Wizards better accommodated) came from Microsoft Money. Jan Miksovsky evangelized 'task based user interfaces' pretty heavily as I recall.
This is an amazing tour. I remember much of this although I didn't move to an MS-DOS machine (from my CP/M-80 collection) until 1985.
Concerning WordStar and its position only a few squares worse than Microsoft Word, I had been an user of the text-based CP/M WordStar. There was also a TextStar, essentially a notepad equivalent, that may have been a concept stage toward WordStar (getting the buffering, etc.). These were also the first I saw of WASD (actually CTRL-W, etc.) as a way to get an arrow island.
I learned later, when the gyrations of management and direction at WordStar were reported, that I knew one of the seniors there from my days at Remington Rand/Sperry Rand/Univac. My sense is that they seemed to get lost on MS-DOS and cratered on Windows, not unlike the misfires at Borland and Lotus.
WordPerfect adherents were a serious bunch and, no matter how the product wandered its way into oblivion, the clamor for a "show tags/properties" sort of thing is a long-standing bugzilla debate on OpenOffice. The problem, of course, was the WordPerfect feature reflected the implementation and all the "all you just have to do" arguing was simply inconsistent with a hierarchical persistent format in XML akin to XHTML and (shudder) CSS, with inheritance and over-rides in the nesting.
There is a way to provide an inspector of text properties, and Microsoft FrontPage (!) offered an adaptable approach. I day-dreamed about an ODF implementation at the Microsoft Works level that handled that and change-tracking from the get-go. Not exactly time well-spent and I have stronger interests now.
(I found a sane way to specify interoperable change-tracking there with a couple of sentences. Instead the committee got lost in a proposal no major implementation would touch and the OASIS TC eventually punted to "by agreement among implementations." In reality, what matters to the dominant implementation is getting the import/export with change-tracked Microsoft Office documents working the same--bugs too--just as Excel is the arbiter of OpenFormula implementations.)
When I was a PM on Excel talking to KirkG about a feature, he gave me a quote that I'll never forget, "Tools/Options is where spineless program managers put their feature when they can't make a *$#^&% decision." I smile ever time I consider the truth of that statement.
One early step in the journey of task panes was with JulieLar when she was still in DevDiv. If I remember right, she was already designing task panes for developer tools. I remember having having early conversations with her about how they might be used in Outlook in 1996ish?
Another big influencer of more text in the interface (for which task panes and Wizards better accommodated) came from Microsoft Money. Jan Miksovsky evangelized 'task based user interfaces' pretty heavily as I recall.
A tooltip is worth 1000 icons.
This is an amazing tour. I remember much of this although I didn't move to an MS-DOS machine (from my CP/M-80 collection) until 1985.
Concerning WordStar and its position only a few squares worse than Microsoft Word, I had been an user of the text-based CP/M WordStar. There was also a TextStar, essentially a notepad equivalent, that may have been a concept stage toward WordStar (getting the buffering, etc.). These were also the first I saw of WASD (actually CTRL-W, etc.) as a way to get an arrow island.
I learned later, when the gyrations of management and direction at WordStar were reported, that I knew one of the seniors there from my days at Remington Rand/Sperry Rand/Univac. My sense is that they seemed to get lost on MS-DOS and cratered on Windows, not unlike the misfires at Borland and Lotus.
WordPerfect adherents were a serious bunch and, no matter how the product wandered its way into oblivion, the clamor for a "show tags/properties" sort of thing is a long-standing bugzilla debate on OpenOffice. The problem, of course, was the WordPerfect feature reflected the implementation and all the "all you just have to do" arguing was simply inconsistent with a hierarchical persistent format in XML akin to XHTML and (shudder) CSS, with inheritance and over-rides in the nesting.
There is a way to provide an inspector of text properties, and Microsoft FrontPage (!) offered an adaptable approach. I day-dreamed about an ODF implementation at the Microsoft Works level that handled that and change-tracking from the get-go. Not exactly time well-spent and I have stronger interests now.
(I found a sane way to specify interoperable change-tracking there with a couple of sentences. Instead the committee got lost in a proposal no major implementation would touch and the OASIS TC eventually punted to "by agreement among implementations." In reality, what matters to the dominant implementation is getting the import/export with change-tracked Microsoft Office documents working the same--bugs too--just as Excel is the arbiter of OpenFormula implementations.)