The UltraTech Zone

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting more file formats in its Office suite in the first half of 2009, and the response from the European Union was one of skepticism. Microsoft intends to increase PDF support natively in Office, as well as add the Open Document Format (ODF), as a part of Service Pack 2 for Office 2007.  The ...

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting more file formats in its Office suite in the first half of 2009 , and the response from the European Union was one of skepticism. Microsoft intends to increase PDF support natively in Office , as well...(read more)

Some days it seems like Microsoft still has a lot to learn about being a team player on a global stage where customers and regulators are interested in open standards and interoperability. They recently got spanked with both the ISO and the IEC while lobbying to get their OpenXML document format established as a global, open standard.  In ...

Some days it seems like Microsoft still has a lot to learn about being a team player on a global stage where customers and regulators are interested in open standards and interoperability. They recently got spanked with both the ISO and the IEC while...(read more)

Or, more precisely, better than many analysts expected.  The analysts always seem to initially expect that the new OS will sell wildly better than the current OS, and then when Microsoft provides any guidance to suggest caution, they downgrade their expectations to ''will probably do poorly''.  Thus, they are always surprised when it ...

The issue I speak of relates to how many changes and new features should go into a new release of their software product.  If Microsoft adds lots of new functionality, then customers and analysts conclude that the likelihood of bugs within the new code is high and so they avoid product adoption for months or years or until several service ...

The issue I speak of relates to how many changes and new features should go into a new release of their software product. If Microsoft adds lots of new functionality, then customers and analysts conclude that the likelihood of bugs within the new code...(read more)

This has been a fun month with all the Daylight Saving Time patching from a myriad of vendors.  (I wonder if anyone has done a study to see how much energy we burned preparing to save three more weeks of daylight?) Although Microsoft is the favorite whipping boy in these situations, they weren't the only vendor that was slow to provide solid ...