Everything is swell when you’re a monopoly; you have the run of your playground, and plenty of minions to look up to you. In Microsoft’s case, Google is the monopoly running an adjacent playground, and threatening to come over and take control, because Google will be more profitable than Microsoft Windows within one year.

Selling Windows Vista isn’t just about glassy interfaces, optimizing performance, and let’s not forgot those “gadgets.” Productivity software is just as important to consumers as a “modern” interface, and doing things like overhauling and reinventing applications like Outlook could have just be the key to getting consumers on board with Windows Vista, and might be the cause of some consumers’ dissatisfaction.

Though many consumers aren’t suffering the woes of being forced to upgrade to Windows Vista, what with a very suitable XP SP3 readily available, businesses are in an altogether different position. Analysts believe that Microsoft’s halt on distribution of XP to retailers and manufacturers will force businesses to upgrade to Vista, whether they like it or not.

The much-anticipated 8th version of Microsoft Internet Explorer has finally been released in Beta to the public.  Internet Explorer 8 comes with quite a few new and nifty features that all Vista and XP users should look forward to.

There are many many articles around at the moment talking about how the Office 2007 Service Pack 1 has automatically installed for a lot of people.  Microsoft had said previously that Office 2007 SP1 would not automatically install and instead be an option.

Microsoft is more than happy to talk sales figures regarding Vista but when it comes to Office products, not so much.  But, new information points out that Office 2007 might be outselling Vista.

Remember the days when “the customer was always right.”  I do, just barely, I came into the world when this strategy was beginning to wane.  Microsoft has adopted just the opposite of this and applied it to Vista and Office 2007 (and 2003).  The WGA failure over the weekend left many legitimate users scratching their head.

Recently we became interested in a problem, one of our writers lacked a scanner but needed to get text out of a document (known as “OCR” or Optical Character Recognition).  There weren’t very many good freeware options, a few paid ones but they were fairly lacking.  All he needed to do was get access to a computer running Vista which had Office 2007 installed which is not hard in our parts.

Microsoft this week shipped a pair of new tools designed to protect users of Microsoft Office 2003 and Office 2007 products from zero-day exploits. The tools allow administrators to block particular Office file types and convert Office documents into Open XML formats, respectively.

Can anyone think of any other company that would purposefully design a program to crash because of a “security” feature? I sure can’t. Microsoft is confident beyond reproach that Vista will be much harder to attack than its predecessors but the Office 2007 team refuses to set any security goals at all.

It seems there are those diehard fans of the classic menu system available in Office 2003 and earlier. I would tell you the only reason to upgrade to Office 2007 is to experience the new ribbon interface which never ceases to impress but it is bound to confuse users used to the old menus and give new users something else to learn.