The Microsoft Office team needs to learn from smaller and more open developers, says Jon Honeyball

My position as honorary grump on the

PC Pro podcast is now enshrined. Part of that stems from cynicism that’s been forcefully baked into me over the years – years that stretch even beyond the first issue of PC Pro and to its predecessor Windows Magazine. Over the past three decades, I’ve been spun more marketing lines, more sales nonsense and more fluff than I care to think about.

I had hoped that things would be better today. The reality is that we just have bigger and better piles of mediocrity. “Helpful” wizards abound and can occasionally can save time. On most occasions, they just get in the way. Whilst it might be time-consuming to work out what you actually need to do, it’s less frustrating than having to undo the well-meaning wizard that steps in and makes things worse. I blame Clippy because, well, I can.

Which brings me to Microsoft Office. Word for Windows, launched in December 1989, was a revelation. It was a breakthrough in what you could do in a GUI word processor, and it left the competition in the dust. Today, Word has more shiny bits, cleverness and capability, but I’m unconvinced that it does the job any better than its grandfather from 30 years ago.

Excel is one of my daily tools yet it drives me to distraction. It’s sometimes helpful to have formatting automatically splodged onto a new cell based on the cells around it, but it’s truly annoying when it wasn’t what you meant. You might argue that Excel made a best guess and sometimes it gets it wrong, but my first task on a new Excel install is to dive into the settings and expunge “Extend data range formats and formulas”. As Ripley said, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

There’s one setting that I can’t get rid of, however. Excel loves to take guesses at what you’re typing, and set the format itself. So if you enter “9/8” instead of “9.8”, Excel decides that you meant 9 August. And this can’t, as far as I can see, be turned off, despite the full stop and slash button being next to each other on my keyboard. As they have been for 30 years.

I’ve sent many a bug report to Microsoft, and occasionally it takes action, but as time has gone on it has become less transparent, choosing to communicate its thinking through fluff-filled blogs with no opportunity for anyone to challenge its thinking. It’s this lack of transparency that drives me nuts. Take Outlook for Mac: this has its new Outlook look and feel, which isn’t unpleasant, but the Office team hasn’t got around to implementing all the UI features in it yet. Import and Export are resolutely greyed out. We, the humble users, must wait until the dev team graces us with its updated code.

So I’d like to give a shout-out to a company that works hard to do better. Stephen Wolfram, CEO of Wolfram software, makers of Mathematica, Wolfram Language and Alpha, does “Live CEO” sessions. These are live code reviews, feature updates, UI designs, and so on, right down to the minutest detail. They’re live-streamed so you can watch and join in, or you can catch up on YouTube.

It’s utterly refreshing to see a CEO who understands the technical complexity of his products, and who has the breadth and depth of knowledge to bring clarity and sanity to his software development teams. Back in Microsoft history, code reviews with Gates were known as “Bill Time” and woe betide any development group that brought half-baked solutions to the meeting. Stephen has a similar laser focus, and I’ve cringed at his evisceration of some code proposals – and wanted to high-five the teams who are clearly doing great work.

It’s almost therapeutic to drop in on these sessions. Much of it is way over my head, but last week included a fascinating hour-long session on the handling of date formats, and what happens when clocks change. A whole level of complexity that I had no idea happened around the world. There can sometimes be three of these streaming sessions per day.

Stephen isn’t exactly shy and retiring, but nor should he be. His willingness to stream these meetings to the internet is something that I find totally engaging. Nor is this some PR campaign conceived in the past few months; there are over 450 of these sessions, covering work in progress, future code design reviews and so forth.

What I’d give to have the Office team do the same. To allow us to see the justifications and thought processes that go into some of their decisions. Perhaps we might have our worst suspicions confirmed, but maybe we’d better understand the challenges they face and be more patient as we wait for greyed-out icons to become active.

I’m unconvinced that Word does the job any better than its great grandfather from 30 years ago

Jon Honeyball v1 was a founding contributing editor to PCPro. Jon Honeyball v2 is still undergoing development. Email jon@jonhoneyball.com