Stan's List

While ZDNet reported weekly sales of Vista are trailing those of XP, BetaNews is reporting that monthly sales figures were being used to calculate weekly sales figures, thus Vista sales might equal those of XP. Huh?

You would think Microsoft would know when CEO Steve Ballmer believes that sales forecasts for its new Vista operating system may be “overly aggressive”. More …

IBM has announced its ‘Open Client Offering’ software, which it says will reduce the costs of supporting multiple platforms in business and education, Playfuls.com reports.

A result of an IBM-Red Hat-Novell partnership, the software can run Windows, Linux or Mac software on desktop PCs, employing the same underlying software code. IBM claims that, “in big organizations, a large, double-digit percentage of users don’t require Windows Office suite licenses, meaning they can save a lot of money.” More …

Remember this quote in 1997:

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Dell said this about Apple, who likely deserved it then. Who could of guessed the massive turn around?

Now it is Dell who is the faltering company. They have a number of problems, not the least of which is improving customer service. An article by the Associated Press discusses the difficult road ahead for returning CEO Michael Dell. More …

In another article, a 130 year old farm house was determined to have been burned down by owner’s Dell laptop. It was reported by The Consumerist, that all attempts to contact Dell have failed. The owner was quoted as saying

I have tried to call Dell to at least notify them of my problems, but each time I have called I get transferred into an endless loop of “Joe” or “Alan” all speaking a delectable version of English I presume emanates from Bangalore. I have been outright hung up on each time I get someone who speaks a reasonable version of English, or sounds like they might be in charge of something. Promises of call backs have gone, of course, unreturned. More …

Dell did announce a recall of Notebook’s due to fire hazard in 2006

If Europe requires Apple, who holds 80% of the music download business, to open its DRM protocol, then certainly M$$$ should be admonished for requiring Mac users to buy a more expensive version of Vista if they want to legally install it in a virtual environment.

Keep in mind, CrossOver Mac allows you to install your favorite Windows applications and games on Mac OS X., without having to install any version of M$$$.

Improvements to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code. In addition, this update includes all of the improvements released in all previous Office 2004 updates. More …

No small thing

M$$$ announces Vista with the usual fanfare. The Guardian focuses on virus warnings already threatening the OS, while the New York Times discusses the bug hunt that’s begun.

M$$$, is not able to “edit” articles on Wikipedia, as is any other entity that would come under suspicion.for conflict of interest. Why would any agent of theirs be acceptable? M$$$ offered to pay a writer to read certain articles concerning open source documents and change anything that was deemed “incorrect”. M$$$ did not consider the articles complimentary. The AP reports More …

The Adobe-Microsoft war hotted up this week with news that Adobe are refusing to allow Redmond to roll PDF support into Office and Windows Vista, as Rediff reports.

Although Adobe has allowed Apple to use display PDF in Mac OS X, Adobe – rightly – doesn’t want MS making money from a product it doesn’t pay for. Adobe also has its Acrobat suite of products for which Microsoft has no competitor. More …

NeoOffice.org announced the forthcoming release of NeoOffice 2.1, the Mac OS X-native version of the OpenOffice.org office suite. Scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2007, the new release will add the latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.1, open/edit/save of Microsoft Office 2007 OpenXML documents, execution of VBA macros in Excel documents, support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets, and more. More …

I could not resist asking the Mac M$$$ Business Group why it was taking 3 months to release a converter for the Office 2007 XML format, when NeoOffice 2.1 included such a converter. Was Uncle Bill mandating a such a delay? They replied that NeoOffices could not translate everything (earlier in the week one MBU member replied that they were working very hard on this converter).

Microsoft has been sending out free top-of-the-line laptops pre-loaded with Vista as a ‘no strings attached gifts’. This ‘reward’ for their hard work on covering tech in general is coincidentally right before the launch of Vista to consumers. To be clear, these weren’t loans, they were gifts, and they were top-of-the-line Acer Ferrari laptops. Microsoft blogger Long Zheng broke the silence over the source of the freebies. More …