Cody Taylor

Pay The Piper writes “As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I’ve been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft’s suite? Besides the obvious ‘free vs. expensive’ argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?” (Given that company-wide rollouts take some time to implement, this early look at the features of OO.o 3.1 may have some relevance, too.)

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ruphus13 writes “Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, claims that the company is very close to the M mark, at which point, they will be a self-sustaining company. While people feel that this should not worry Microsoft, the real question is whether a 10,000 person effort on a failure like Vista can actually be the paradigm of a long-term strategy. From the article: ‘Microsoft had 10,000 people [the article is unclear whether these were all developers, or administrative and support staff were factored in] working on Vista for a five year period … huge profits in any given year can mean relatively little five years on. Canonical’s self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening — but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft’s development process really is.'”

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twitter writes “Four years after Steve Ballmer vowed to kill Google, Wired details Microsoft’s, AT&T’s, and big publishers’ ongoing slog. The story is filled with astroturfers, lobbyists and others spending millions to manufacture FUD about privacy and monopoly in order to protect the obsolete business models of their patrons, who are mostly known for progress-halting monopoly and invasion of privacy. Their greatest coup to date was preventing Google from rescuing Yahoo.”

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Will Windows 7 achieve the respect that Vista failed to win? It’s telling that one element of Windows 7 Microsoft isn’t especially trumpeting (amidst the cloud of self-congratulation about how the new OS is slicker, faster and essentially the Barack Obama of networking) is its gaming clout.

Looking at the end-of-year NPD numbers from Friday, it’s clear that Sony failed to grab any real momentum away from Nintendo or Microsoft; the performance of the PlayStation 3 is simply dire. No one is arguing that the system isn’t wonderful, as we called the hardware the best product in 2008, and the games available for the system were some of the

Itsabouttime writes “In a preliminary ruling, the European Commission told Microsoft that linking Internet Explorer to its dominant Windows operating system violates EC rules . The EC’s ruling was triggered by a complaint from IE rival Opera. Microsoft could seek to offer a Windows version without IE, as it did in the EC’s 2004 ruling on Windows Media Player.”

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