Weblogs: Well, thanks, Microsoft

Higgaion: "The Microsoft Mactopia newsletter for September 2005 just arrived in my e-mail inbox, and once again I am completely underwhelmed. The newsletter has a couple of 'back-to-school' articles about using Office 2004 in education. Yawn. This is old news, Microsoft. The newsletter encourages teachers and students to manage their schedules using Entourage, but still doesn't offer a solution to the persistent and vexing Error 1025 problem (Microsoft Entourage always returns an error when checking a Microsoft Exchange inbox, yep) despite a year's worth of complaints on the Microsoft support forums and third-party support forums. The newsletter encourages students to use Word to write for their English, history, and science classes, and in fact I do require my students to turn in their papers digitally in Word, RTF, or PDF format. But it's a good thing Microsoft didn't mention Hebrew or Arabic studies classes in their blurb, because the several-hundred-dollar Microsoft Word 2004 still doesn't handle right-to-left Unicode as well as the $29 Mellel. Oh, but now we can download Microsoft Messenger 5.0 with a brushed metal skin. Yee-haw. Microsoft, how about giving us some actual bug fixes? Every program I use except for MS Office and Dreamweaver can mix left-to-right and right-to-left Unicode with ease. Why can't Word? Apple's bundled Mail program works beautifully with an Exchange server (via IMAP), why doesn't Entourage? This fluffy stuff is getting old, Microsoft. And yet I keep using Word, because there's no other word processor out there that offers the same level of page-element positioning and a robust macro language. I guess this is what co-dependency feels like."