439 You know when you hear everyone, absolutely everyone complaining about how terrible something is, and you think to yourself, "Oh, it couldn't possibly be that bad?" Such thoughts inevitably come up with people discuss Microsoft's Mac Word 6, a program so hated that Microsoft had to go back and make Word 5 available for purchase.

So what went wrong?

Microsoft developer Rick Schaut pulls back the curtain to give us a view of what happened to make one of the most notorious programs in Mac history. His blog entry gives a fascinating history on the subject, starting with the much loved Word 5:

While Mac Word 5 was a great product, there was one problem with it: Win Word 2. They both shipped at about the same time, but Win Word 2 had more features (most notably a macro language, but there were a few others). This was a major sore point for Mac Word users. They wanted feature parity, and they wanted it now! The longer they had to wait for feature parity between Win Word and Mac Word, the more we got raked over the coals.

Add to that changes in management in the middle of the project:

At the time Chris Mason was the development manager for Word, and he strongly disagreed with Chris Peters’ decision. As a result, Chris Mason left the Word group to work on other things at Microsoft. Chris Mason understood the Mac, and had been a Word developer going back to Mac Word 3.0. Chris Mason was replaced by Ed Fries, who was far less of a Mac person than Chris Mason was, so we lost a good bit of Mac understanding in the higher-level management of the Word group. While it’s impossible to say exactly what effect this had, there’s a high probability that some of the trade-offs we made with Mac Word 6.0 would have gone in a different direction.

A must read for those curious about what makes a program "Mac-like."

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