I don’t actually have anything against Bill Gates, but it seems to me that he and his company have done a lot to ruin writing, design, art work, illustration, photography, and public speaking. Mr. Gates did this by helping to put PCs in every household and then providing tools that he assured them would allow them to write, design, edit, and produce printed pieces, websites, presentations, and all manner of creative enterprises. He is an artful marketing and he persuaded the whole world of PC users that just owning PhotoShop meant you were a artist and owning Word was enough to make you a writer and a designer.
Furthermore, even people who never mastered these programs felt that somehow writing and art work were "easy," now that there were "tools" that made it very simple to do.
I recently worked for a client who wanted me to format some text and photographs in a Word document. I’m a writer so while I’m adept enough at formatting (that is, skilled but not really talented), I agreed. Then I was told to send the file off to the printer because they were printing from the Word document. In my entire career (and that’s more than two decades) I have never sent Word files to a printer.
The newbie at the client company just told me, "That’s how we do it all of the time." I’m sure it is, but it’s wrong. It results in amateurish-looking materials. A great printed piece just be carefully laid out. Photographs need to be, well, I don’t know exactly, but you can’t just plop in some digital images from sixteen different sources (like I did) and expect to get a nice-looking brochure.
When the brochure turned out to be just a little bit north of hideous, the client supposed (I am certain) that it was my ineptitude.
Really and truly, writing is hard. Design is hard. You need a certain amount of education to do these things, and then a certain amount of training and experience. On top of that, you should have some talent, I would rather work with a great writer who knew what she was doing and did not own a computer than work with the latest hire of a big company, straight from business school, who was expert on the PC and thought she could write. The computer isn’t a secret font of writing ability. True, a good writer who can use a computer has a great tool at her disposal. But a person who can’t write, can’t spell, and has no grasp of sequential thought (huh?) will still never be able to write well even if she had the greatest computer on earth.
And that’s how Bill Gates plus American style overblown self-esteem ("I’m great at everything I do!") ruined writing.
This holds true for all forms of writing and computer usage. I work at a law firm and virtually ALL incoming associates believe they know how to use a computer and are more efficient writing at a computer. Unfortunately, virtually ALL of them use their computer as simply a fancy typwriter and are clueless regarding proper document formatting for everything from automatic numbering and styles to preventing document corruption and protecting their firm from improper release of metadata. They don’t use their assistants/secretaries because they think they know better. The assistants are experts at these things (most of them) and know proper formatting for all these things and more. Simply knowing how to type on a computer does not equal writing ability or computer knowledge.
This holds true for all forms of writing and computer usage. I work at a law firm and virtually ALL incoming associates believe they know how to use a computer and are more efficient writing at a computer. Unfortunately, virtually ALL of them use their computer as simply a fancy typwriter and are clueless regarding proper document formatting for everything from automatic numbering and styles to preventing document corruption and protecting their firm from improper release of metadata. They don\’t use their assistants/secretaries because they think they know better. The assistants are experts at these things (most of them) and know proper formatting for all these things and more. Simply knowing how to type on a computer does not equal writing ability or computer knowledge.