Microsoft Word for the Mac versions 4 and 5 were my introductions to Word, and in the opinion of myself and many other people, were the pinnacle of Microsoft’s Mac programming.

I had a single 1.4Mb floppy disc on my first Mac (a Mac Classic) that had the MS Word program and every paper I wrote for school that year, and it ran quite happily in the 1Mb of RAM that my lil’ Classic had in it. Word 5, while not that small, was the perfect combination of features and usability, adding useful functions without becoming too much of a memory, space, or speed hog.

Then came Word 6.

Huge. Bloated. A memory hog. Dog-slow. And a truly hideous interface that only a Windows user could love (or even feel at home in).

Things have improved since then, thankfully — Word (and Office) for Mac OS X is actually useable, though I tend not to bother unless I have a really pressing need (such as getting into old archived documents laying around on my system), as the majority of my writing these days is either coding my site in BBEdit or posting via Ecto.

Still, it was quite interesting to find this look at the creation of MS Word 6 from Rick Schaut, one of the people on the team for Word 6.

Shipping a crappy product is a lot like beating your head against the wall.  It really does feel good when you ship a great product as a follow-up, and it really does motivate you to spend some time trying to figure out how not to ship a crappy product again.

Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product.  And, we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again.  In the process, we learned a few things, not the least of which was the meaning of the term “Mac-like.”

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p>(via Scoble)

iTunes: “Homey Don’t Play Dat” by Bonnie ‘n’ Clyde from the album Terminator X and the Valley of the Jeep Beats (1991, 4:12).

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