Word recovered under the hood by losing the users data but never losing the GUI. The user still thinks it's bad, but he won't think it's unusable. To some degree he will blame himself for not saving the data himself.
You've never done user support, have you? Almost everyone would prefer "UI freaks out for a bit, restarts with no lost work" to "invisible loss of work".
Edit: I've just remembered while I was arranging my mortgage, the customer rep was using some sort of Windows native LOB application. It popped up a failure dialog box with some hex in it .. which she closed and carried on. Users don't care about quality unless and until it stops them doing what they're doing or loses work.
I'm writing code that is used by the people next door in the same office. So while I haven't worked in user support in some regard it's about 95% of my work. So what I write is really experience directly from the users. Some users might be different though. Thinking about my mother/grandfather etc, they also hate crashes, though. "UI freaks out and then restarts" is definitely better than losing data, but the word "crash" for me means not to restart. If Word crashes it doesn't come back. You are left with your desktop and an error message if at all.
You've never done user support, have you? Almost everyone would prefer "UI freaks out for a bit, restarts with no lost work" to "invisible loss of work".
Edit: I've just remembered while I was arranging my mortgage, the customer rep was using some sort of Windows native LOB application. It popped up a failure dialog box with some hex in it .. which she closed and carried on. Users don't care about quality unless and until it stops them doing what they're doing or loses work.