Auto-correct This, Mr. Gates

Spell check is a great and wonderous thing. Sure, everything I handwrite is slightly sloppier and I don't worry so much about those pesky spelling rules because I know if I get it phonetically close I can just right-click my way to correct spelling. And, heck, if I type "becuase" instead of "because", well, Word 2000 will correct it before my thumb is even off the space bar.

Forget to capitalize something? e.e. cummings, be damned. Word will be happy to fix it. No problem. At all. Those single "I"s are meant to be capitalized. And if you put a "1." in once you want the next one to be a "2." and it should be in the exact same place and....

Thanks for thinking for me.

Microsoft makes great products. They are, relatively speaking, easy to use. They work consistently and they are ubiquitously available. I'm a pretty happy Office 2000 user.

The problem with Microsoft isn't the quality of their products. Sure they're buggy but, my God, they're huge; cut them some coding slack. The problem isn't the monopoly issues (my local trash company has a monopoly and no one's taking them before a federal judge). The problem is that they limit creativity with a coporporate dress code that allows for white collars and blue ties only. Within that, you can wear whatever you want.

It is not a system that encourages thinking outside of the box. That is a problem.

I spend a handful of daytimes hours every week teaching little kids how to use computers. They become unglued by the red line. Go ahead, you explain to an eight-year-old that her name isn't really spelled wrong; it just isn't in the computer's dictionary. The girl sitting next to her? Oh, that's just a more common first name. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with yours. It's just different.

Microsoft and different: two things that don't go hand in hand.

This is the world we live in. Challenged regularly to come up with workable solutions to problems that threaten our envirnoment, our homes, our lives. How do we have sex without dying? How do we get the products we want without wasting half the planet in the process? How do we change what we want?

Do we need big, powerful word processing programs that we can integrate with our other office functions? You betcha. Do we need programs that think and design for us? Decide that the most common approach is the best approach? We absolutely do not.