Tag: Microsoft

Eight compelling reasons why you should not even think of using Office 2007?

I read Eight compelling reasons why you should not even think of using Office 2007, and I think I would like to respond to these “eight compelling reasons”.

  1. New default file formats? Microsoft offers the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack so that users of Office XP and Office 2003 can work with the new file formats. I am not really worried about OpenOffice, since I do not know anyone who uses it. If you really need to, save as .DOC or PDF from within Office 2007.
  2. OOXML is Evil? FUD from the open source, anti-Microsoft crowd. While I do not support fast-tracking OOXML (or anything else) through ISO, the rest of the rhetoric is just noise propagated (largely) by Microsoft’s competitors (remember, they are in this to make money, too).
  3. The learning curve? The learning curve on the UI is minimal, unless you are a potato.
  4. Need too much hardware? I am running quite nicely on a 2 year old Tablet PC with a 1.5 GHz Centrino, and 1 gb of RAM. Hardly a high end machine.
  5. You will get viruses? More FUD. The DOCX format is safer than the .DOC format.
  6. Open Source is Good for the World? This is a philosophical opinion. If that is the way your philosophy points you, then by all means, stick with OpenOffice.
  7. You have to pay for it? No argument there – if you cannot afford to buy it, don’t buy it.
  8. It is proprietary? More FUD. Apple is worse the MS in terms of being proprietary, but no one cares, right?

Just my thoughts. Cheers 

Why No One Plays on CodePlex

In response to the post Microsoft’s Open Source Software is Junk? and the article which triggered it, I would like to offer a few comments:

  1. CodePlex is not “Microsoft’s Open Source Software”. CodePlex is a sandbox where others can create open source software based on the Microsoft platform(s). 
  2. To say there are no interesting projects on CodePlex is something of an exaggeration. To say that it is “all junk” is just a sensationalistic headline trying to suck in readers. That said, much of the more interesting stuff actually comes from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group (such as the Enterprise Library), and so open source zealots do not recognize it. I would agree that there are few, if any, mature projects there which did not originate inside Microsoft.
  3. Do people not enjoy developing in .NET? Well, given the number of people using it, I would say many do enjoy developing using .NET (and no, they are not all Microsoft cronies, and they are not all forced to by evil, imperialistic employers). 
  4. While there are few mature .NET projects on CodePlex, that does NOT mean open source project based on .NET do not exist. Look around SourceForge. There are a lot of successful, valuable projects there based on the .NET platform.
  5. Look at the profile of the typical open source developer. Typically, they are coming from a very anti-Microsoft state of mind. Given that, they are not likely to develop their great idea on the .NET platform (even if it would be an ideal platform for it – they are making emotional and philosophical decisions, not technical ones). Even if they can bring themselves to use a Microsoft platform, they are definitely not going to host that project on a Microsoft-controlled site, where the evil empire could steal their radically brilliant work.
  6. Until relatively recently, there were no Microsoft-supplied free tools to develop on .NET (there have been a couple of open source tools, such as #develop, which is of course hosted on SourceForge). Open source developers are even less likely to pay Microsoft for the privilege of developing on .NET.
  7. Look at the life cycle of “successful” open source projects. Apache and Linux have been around for a very long time. Of course they are going to be much more mature than anything on the .NET side (though I am not sure many open source projects in any context will have the level of success these have had). FireFox hardly started from scratch, but from a large code-base of pre-existing code. A significant advantage. If Microsoft were to open source IE, you might see a big jump in open source browser development over top of it (though I doubt it, given point (4)).
  8. The existence of successful open source projects (again, leaving aside Apache and Linux) is largely a by product of having lots of open source projects. It is like ideas, the more you have of them, the more likely you might have a good one. There are not enough open source projects on .NET to have that “critical mass”, and given point (4), there may never be.

Some good OOXML analyses

This article has some good thoughts about the weaknesses of OOXML. I am not sure I agree with all of the author’s conclusions, but it is definitely worth reading if you are interested in the OOXML standardization debate.

http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/OOXML-is-defective-by-design.html

Microsoft Unveils New Linux Hate Site?

The post Microsoft Unveils New Linux Hate Site, refers to Microsoft’s replacement for their “Get the Facts” site as a “Linux Hate Site”. I saw the same comment on Digg a couple of days ago.

What are these people smoking? Where on that site is there anything “hateful” about Linux. Microsoft is a commercial software organization. They sell operating system software, including some for servers. They consider Linux to be competition. Hence, they have content which compares their products to their competition (Linux, mainframes, etc.). In typical marketing fashion, their site shows that their products are better than the competition. It would be sort of stupid to do otherwise.

How is this different than the marketing efforts of pretty much every other commercial organization in the world?

I also noticed a rant in a comment on Digg about how badly designed the page was, because the person making the comment could not find the so-called “comparison”. I think the tabs along the top point to the comparison pretty clearly, as does the big piece of white text on bright orange background that says “Find out how Windows Server compares to Linux ->”.

The point I am trying to make here is that the Linux community damages its own cause by making meaningless, fact-deprived statements. Stop ranting about MS and do something useful.   

Microsoft Windows Vista and Paranoia

There is nothing particularly new in this article Forget about the WGA! 20+ Windows Vista Features and Services Harvest User Data for Microsoft – From your machine! – Softpedia, but it was referenced on a blog post I came read this evening. I few thoughts came to mind:

  1. From what I have seen of the various services which collect information, most seem to be collecting information to improve the OS, adapt to threats, or protect the intellectual property contained within the software (I am not arguing for or against the IP protection, but if you installed the OS, you accepted the EULA, and are bound by it – no one forced you to do so).
  2. Despite the deep paranoia of the various conspiracy theorists, Microsoft really has little use for most of your personal information, and it is not really worth the time or effort to collect it. You are not that important.
  3. Unless you are doing something illegal, none of the information collected is a threat to you.
  4. It is interesting and ironic that a site posting this article to help protect all of us from evil Microsoft collecting our information, requires you to register and provide your eMail address in order to post a comment.
  5. That in a world where much of our personal information, communications, and movement is tracked in great detail (and with questionable legality) that people can get this excited about anything Microsoft might be collecting! 

More OOXML Standarization Noise

I found this post by Mark Shuttleworth interesting and well written (I found it after reading a ZDNet article referencing it – I will not link to it, since the ZDNet blogs do not seem to handle trackbacks) Emerging consensus in favour of a unified document format standard?

I agree with a number of things in this post.

Is Microsoft investing heavily in getting OOXML accepted? I would be pretty sure they are – I would be.

I agree there are technical issues with the current OOXML spec, based upon what I have read elsewhere. I do not believe that these issues are a reason to abandon the spec, only that “fast-tracking” the spec without fixing them is wrong. The OOXML spec should go through as much review as is necessary to satisfy the standards bodies that it is ready.

I agree that ODF supporters (and other OOXML opponents) should make their opinions known in a technically meaning full way to their representatives on the standards bodies.

I also believe that supporters of OOXML should do the same.  

I still disagree with the belief that there must be one “standard”. It still seems strangely ironic to me that the open source community is very much in favour of having alternatives, as long as the alternatives do not come from Microsoft.

Is Vista as bad as they say?

Over the last few months (or the last year or more), it has become extremely fashionable to beat up on Vista. Heck, it is a great way to generate hits on you site or blog, maybe get Dugg, whether you have anything useful to say or not. I am talking about posts like this, or this, or this whole blog.

Personally, I run Vista on several machines, and have few problems which were not related to the failure of third parties to provide updated drivers, or updated versions of software for Vista (sometimes makes me wonder if there has been a conspiracy on the part of other vendors to purposely sabotage Vista – but it is more likely just not bothering to provide what customers pay for). I also still run XP on a couple of boxes, and Win2K3. On my main development box, I also run a number of operating systems in VMWare, including WinXP, Win 2K3, Fedora, Ubuntu, and several “minimalist” Linux distros for playing around with.

An unfortunate fact of life is that all operating systems available right now suck, at least in some aspect or another. Linux suffers from many driver limitations (though this is getting better), and a wannabe user interface that spends far too much time trying to look like Windows, while missing the point of usability altogether. Windows (all versions) suffer from security issues, and from performance and stability issues inherent in trying to be all things to all people. I will not comment on Mac OSX, because I have not run it. It is also kind of irrelevant, since I cannot run it unless I buy Apple’s hardware.

Vista has its own usability issues. Some that are pointed out are valid. The UAC implementation is moronic. The UI path you have to follow to connect to a wireless network is annoying. Here is one I discovered today – disk defragmentation. When you defragment you hard drive you get this useful dialog:

defrag

Isn’t that helpful? No progress indication. No estimated time to completion. Just a statement that it could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Gee, thanks.

The problem is, this kind of thing is not just a problem in Vista, or Windows in general. It is pervasive in all operating systems, and almost all software written to run on them. Most software is filled with minor little usability gaps like this.

So stop beating up on Vista (unless you need the traffic), and start thinking about how to make the whole situation better.

VentureBeat » Google continues its assault on Microsoft, offering StarOffice suite

VentureBeat » Google continues its assault on Microsoft, offering StarOffice suite

Two thoughts spring to mind:

  1. If StarOffice cannot compete successfully against MS Office, does it matter that Google is bundling it?
  2. If Google had faith in its web-based office applications, and in the vision of all apps as web apps, why is it bundling a desktop-based office suite?

Snipping Tool in Vista

This is a nice post about the Snipping Tool in Vista. I really, really liked the design of the snipping tool that was pat of the Tablet PC Experience Pack on Windows XP. Unfortunately, I cannot show a picture, because I am not running Windows XP anywhere, but the UI while in snipping mode was very nice, with a semi-circular menu docked to the bottom of the sceen with you snipping options.

Oh well – nice post anyway.