JANUARY 8, 2007
Microsoft's Remodeled Office
,----[ Summary ]
| Office has a nifty new look and feel, but it's not a must-have
`----
http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_02/b4016023.htm
Related:
The Single Worst Thing About Office 2007
,----[ Quote ]
| I've said here that I'm a fan of Microsoft Office 2007. After using it
| even more, for most of my daily work, I still am. But one major
| downside merits mention: It's kind of an unfinished product.
`----
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/003172.html
Five reasons not to upgrade to Office 2007
,----[ Quote ]
| Reason 1: You already know how to use your favourite Office applications.
|
| Reason 2: You like a consistent interface in all of your apps.
|
| Reason 3: You frequently exchange files with users outside your
| organisation.
|
| Reason 4: You use macros and other customisation features extensively.
|
| Reason 5: It's still essentially a version 0 application.
`----
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/7684/53/
Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts
,----[ Quote ]
| Let's take a closer look at the what is being offered as part of
| this "royalty free" deal from Microsoft....Not very open source
| friendly, is this? You can marry into the family and get
| protection from the Godfather, but you can't transfer this to
| anyone. They need to make their own accommodation with
| Microsoft. This makes me wonder about the Microsoft-funded
| ODF Add-in for Word that Clever Age and others are working
| on. This add-in does UI-level manipulations of the Office 2007
| ribbon. Are they covered under Microsoft's license program? Are
| their user's covered? What about anyone who takes the source code
| and modifies it and redistributes it?...This is very reminiscent
| of the original license on the Microsoft binary file formats,
| back in the days when the specifications were published on MSDN
| CD's...Interestingly in that case, once they achieved their goal
| of total market domination, Microsoft removed the file format
| documentation from MSDN and it was only available under a special
| license. They started open, in order to gain market domination,
| but once their goals were achieved, the openness ended. What
| prevents this from happening again?
`----
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/11/beware-of-geeks-bearing-gifts.h
Korean court rebuffs Microsoft in patents case
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft has taken another slap from the authorities in Korea, after
| a court decision in a patent dispure raised the prospect of Officeb
| eing taken off the shelves in the country.
|
| Microsoft said it was continuing to dispute the patent's validity.
`---- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/27/ms_korea_court/
Office 2007 may be Microsoft's Titanic: former Government IT boss
,----[ Quote ]
| Bill Gates has been talking up Office 2007 ahead of its business launch
| on November 30. However, the recently departed deputy CIO of one of
| Australia's biggest government Microsoft sites believes introducing
| the new version of Microsoft Office may be the company's biggest
| ever disaster.
`----
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/7234/53/
Microsoft ignores malware evolution threat to Office
,----[ Quote ]
| "At Kaspersky Lab" the report notes "we even started betting on how long
| it would take for a new vulnerability to be detected in Office after
| the previous patch had been released. And the question wasn't whether
| a new vulnerability would be detected, but when: in each case, it was
| clearly only a matter of time, and not much time at that." To make
| matters worse, for pretty much all of the reported vulnerabilities there
| were literally dozens of Trojans detected, so we are not talking
| isolated attacks here but large scale, determined exploitation of
| known holes.
`----
http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1063.html
Microsoft Office lock-in and the deal with Novell
,----[ Quote ]
| It details how Microsoft has built into Vista the "trusted
| computing" ability to lock down Office files via DRM such that
| no unauthorized document reader will be able to decrypt and
| read them. This is perhaps one of the biggest hidden weapons
| Microsoft has in its arsenal that could sabotage Linux and
| OpenOffice.org if Microsoft succeeds in its attempt to plug
| SUSE and all Novell's "interoperability" bonuses.
`----
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000142
There's also poor ODF support (semi-baked plugin).
Is Open XML a one way specification for most people?
,----[ Quote ]
| Who will implement Open XML correctly and fully? Maybe Microsoft.
| Why? Since it is essentially a dump into XML of all the data
| needed for all the functionality of their Office products and
| since those products are proprietary, only they will understand
| any nuances that go beyond the spec. The spec may illuminate
| some of the mistakes that have been made and are now being
| written into a so called standard for all to have to implement,
| but I'm guessing there might be a few other shades of meaning
| that will not be clear. Fully and correctly implementing Open
| XML will require the cloning of a large portion of Microsoft's
| product. Best of luck doing that, especially since they have
| over a decade head start. Also, since they have avoided using
| industry standards like SVG and MathML, you'll have to
| reimplement Microsoft's flavor of many things. You had
| better start now. So therefore I conclude that while Microsoft
| may end up supporting most of Open XML (and we'll have to
| see the final products to see how much and how correctly),
| other products will likely only end up supporting a subset.
`----
http://sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=1145
|
|
