There’s no denying that Microsoft Word is the de facto standard for word processing documents, but every once in a while I will entertain a daydream for a more streamlined, less buggy alternative. Had it not been for the terrible name, I might have turned earlier to Mellel, which is a smooth, elegant and powerful multilingual word processing contender from RedleX. It was written for Mac OS X from the ground up, which makes it seem a thousand times more fluid than Word, in spite of its admittedly butt-ugly, brushed metal interface.

Unfortunately, the program’s interoperability with Word is not so hot, seriously undermining its real world utility if you ever need to exchange documents with others. And that’s one of the really unfortunate things about Microsoft-dominated software markets. You could create the most sophisticated, powerful and user friendly application the world has ever seen, but if it’s in a market — like word processing — that is more or less owned by Microsoft, it would be an almost pointless exercise unless your software can play completely nice with the market leader.