How come the magic-factories that can conjure up the iPhone, reliable wifi, secure e-commerce and all the other tech miracles that so enhance modern life can’t produce a decent word processor?
It’s a question that’s bugging the Monday Note’s Frederic Filloux as he pays his ‘Microsoft tax’ this year. His beef, though, is not about basic functionality, but bells and whistles. What Filloux wants is high-tech autocorrect that helps compensate for plummeting writing standards.
As a writing professional I don’t much care for autocorrect. All I’m after is word processing that works reliably. Something that doesn’t crash inexplicably at a critical point in a large edit, randomly introduce comedy rogue formatting or make it excruciatingly difficult to place an image exactly where you might want it on the page.
I would run willingly into the arms of any firm that could deliver a bombproof, intuitive and joyful WP package, handing over my credit card details as I did so. Surely in an increasingly app-driven world there’s a market for this?