The most common complaints about Microsoft Corp’s Word 6 for the Macintosh concern the application’s performance – asked about the speed of operation on Power Macs, one user replied: You’d never guess that there is a RISC chip in there. Microsoft officials tried to blame some of these problems on users running 68000 versions of the package under emulation. However, the release of version 6a is an acknowledgement that all is not as it should be. UK sources denied that the speed problems were a direct result of Microsoft’s policy of coding applications in an intermediate pseudo-code to aid cross-system portability. They said the new release will fix specific performance problems in areas such as loading times, spell checking and type-ahead. The release will also attempt to cure some software clashes with extensions, and ease migration for Word 5 users, some of whom have been baffled by the radically new interface design. The upgrade will be issued free to all anyone that bought Word 6.
