Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

That sound you hear is my head hitting the desk

Microsoft delays Office 2007 again:

Microsoft said Thursday that it is making another slight delay to the planned arrival time for Office 2007, citing performance concerns with recent test versions.

The software maker now plans to finish the code for the revamped Office suite by the end of the year, with a mainstream launch in “early 2007.”

“Based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance, we are revising our development schedule to deliver the 2007 system release by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007,” a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail. “Feedback on quality and performance will ultimately determine the exact dates.”

And, of course, this means that Windows Vista is probably going to slip as well. Because Office is the one that’s in good shape.

Ship it when it’s ready, not a day earlier. It’s good to see that Microsoft would rather risk some embarrassment than hit the deadlines regardless of the product’s quality.

More Firefox irony

So, you’re a Firefox evangelist and you’re going to preach about the evils of ActiveX:

For years, Mozilla struggled with website compatibility issues because it did not support Microsoft’s ActiveX technology, another major vector for security attacks on users. Not only would it have been a lot of work to reverse engineer and build Mozilla support for ActiveX, it would have opened Mozilla up to some of the worst threats on the Web. It would have been a bad idea. With the upcoming IE 7 (promised almost a year and a half ago) Microsoft says that “allowing ActiveX controls to run in IE should be the exception”. Good idea. And only about 5 years late.

(Clearing throat and doing best Keith Olbermann impersonation here…)

OK, then maybe your webpage shouldn’t include an embedded ActiveX control:

Here’s a snippet of the source code from the page (with angle brackets converted to square brackets and URL broken so I don’t try to force a QuickTime control down my visitors’ throats):

[object codebase=”http: //www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab” width=”480″ classid=”clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” height=”376″] [emphasis added]

Just sayin’.

The joys (not) of dial-up Internet access

We’ve been having sporadic blackouts over the past three days. The power was out for several hours on Monday morning, and then again yesterday.

It could be just a coincidence, but when the power came back up, my high-speed Internet connection didn’t. Calls to Qwest (whose technical support is consistently excellent and customer-focused) confirmed that the problem was on their end. Service was restored in minutes on Monday, but it took all day yesterday – apparently a crucial piece of hardware in a server at the calling office failed and had to be swapped out.

So, for most of the workday yesterday, I had to use the free dial-up service that comes with my Qwest account. The experience was a serious blow to productivity, but at least (he says in an effort to find some silver lining in all this) it gave me an opportunity to test the dial-up features in Windows Vista.

From a usability point of view, setting up a dial-up connection in Vista was a complete home run. I plugged in my ancient modem, ran the Create New Connection, clicked the Connect To… link in Network Center, entered the dial-up access number and credentials, and was online in less than two minutes.

But damn, it was slow. I have a newfound appreciation for the frustration experienced by anyone who is stuck with dial-up in 2006.

The new Scoble?

Nah. But heads are exploding over this news from Adam Shostack:

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve accepted a position with Microsoft. I’ll talk in a bit about the work I’ll be doing, but before I do, I’d like to talk a bit about the journey that’s brought me here, and the change I’ve seen in Microsoft that makes me feel really good about this decision.

(Via Prof. Froomkin)

Quotes of the day

Paul Boutin on Slate’s curious unwillingness through 2005 to publish a disclaimer about its relationship with Microsoft:

A concise but unambiguous “No one at Microsoft dictates, edits, approves or redacts a word of what we write about their Swiss-cheese software or its over-evangelized competitors” would’ve probably sufficed to put tech readers at ease.

Robert McLaws on Microsoft’s decision to kill WinFS as a standalone project, as announced by Quentin Clark of the WinFS team:

Hey, I chug the Kool-Aid from a freakin beer bong here, but even I have to say that Microsoft’s putting a PR spin on this albatross that probably isn’t going to fly. “it’s not dead… it lives on in productized form in Katmai!” Yeah, and Bob lived on to become Clippy.

Rick Mahn, after installing a stack of pre-release software from Microsoft:

Ah, Microsoft beta software. Applications you love to hate… wait a minute. This stuff actually works!