Posted on 06/20/2007 6:30:02 PM PDT by Salo
Microsoft is making Office 2007 its default productivity suite for system builders, less than five months after the suite's full-scale launch.
Say Goodbye to Office 2003
Microsoft will stop supplying (http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2007/06/18/3384613.aspx) OEM Microsoft Office 2003 from June 30, Microsoft exec Eric Ligman wrote yesterday on the company's blog for small businesses.
The declaration means that Microsoft partners without inventory of Office 2003 must ship Office 2007 from July onwards.
Microsoft is making a heavy push for Office 2007 and seems to be now using OEM partners in the vanguard for driving sales.
Previous editions of Office have sold relatively slowly during the last 10 years, with a sizeable percentage of the customer base clinging to increasingly out-dated editions. That's a problem for Microsoft, as it means a key product in its core business isn't growing as it should.
Office 2007 is relatively early in the Microsoft lifecycle, having officially launched in January following limited availability in November, while Office 2003 was launched in October 2003. The older product still enjoys mainstream product support (http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/) from Microsoft and partners, while also being well within its extended lifecycle support.
Customers on volume licensing agreements can still run Office 2003 by activating the downgrade rights in their contracts from Office 2007. OEM Microsoft Office does not have downgrade rights.
Microsoft is running a webcast (http://blogs.msdn.com/mssmallbiz/archive/2007/06/15/3316782.aspx) on June 21 to explain licensing options to resellers for Windows, Office and Server products. ®
Based on your constant verbal fellatio toward all things Microsoft, one has to wonder...
Yes but with a capitalistic model, not a socialistic one.
Not true, I can’t stand Office 2007. But I would never use a crappy copy of it made by socialists instead.
For anyone else looking at a Vista "upgrade" (I just can't even type that with a straight face) with fear and trepidation in your wallet... I suggest it is time to seriously look at Linux as a viable alternative. I also have Ubuntu 7.04 running on an old beater system just for kicks. It is a Pentium-II at 450MHz with 320M of memory. Sure, it is a little slow - it takes about 12 sec to load Firefox. But it does work. When you can have a usable OS, and complete set of applications - free, that run on your existing hardware, no upgrades, no DRM nightmares etc. I don't know why anyone would go spend hundreds of dollars for a virus launching platform...
Yeah, and Bill Gates is such a wonderful guy... He just sent is goons, er, I mean lawyers, to attempt to extort payments from Linux vendors and users. Oh, wait, it wasn't quite outright extortion. How did he phrase it? Something along the lines of "You're in violation of 235 Microsoft patents. We might sue you...unless you sign this here agreement and pay us... Oh, what's that? No, I can't tell you which patents. Trust me, you're in violation, pay up or something bad might happen to your business..."
If that were a big guy in a cheap suit selling "fire insurance" to the corner coffee shop, we would all know exactly what was going on. But I guess when a billionaire does it, it is not a crime, it is business strategy.
If I have to choose the lesser of two evils, I'll go with the open source movement. At least they are not trying to lock me in to their products and only their products. If Novel/Suse gets a little too full of themselves, it's off to Red Hat or Ubuntu. Being pro-business and capitalism is great. But monopolies and monopolistic behavior sucks. (unless you are the monopoly)
In spite of the ultra - politically correct philosophy of Ubuntu, I think it does have the easiest learning curve for Windows users and seems to be a good, stable Linux distro although I have heard complaints about security.
If I did not still have to make a living with MS products, I would have switched to it by now.
Firefox is better than IE in every way.
Which is exactly why 1) MS is freaking out and 2) They have planned out a future where software is leased via web services, rather than sold, so users will have to pay a fee every month for their word processor, etc.
I did that because as an I.T. professional I felt I should be familiar with Vista. Now I am sorry. I should have put Vista on an old machine instead and bought Acer with Linux instead of Toshiba with Vista because the *#!#&&$# manufacturer of its wireless adapter and other peripheral suppliers have not developed drivers other than for Vista.
So now I use the notebook primarily as a remote client to my desktop or work in virtual XP machines.
Office 2003 is good enough for me. I don’t care what the monopoly thinks.
Take a class at college and buy the student and teachers edition. It’s really cheap.
I don’t buy every version either but I would if I had to instead of waiting on handouts from “the community”.
And Microsoft hasn’t done that????
Well lets see, which promotes businesses? (other than themselves?) Which is more friendly to development of new products?
On the one hand we have the open source movement. Cost of entry: $0 - you can get the operating system and development tools free. Information on how to develop a product on an open source platform? Freely available and documented.
On the other hand we have a huge corporation. Operating system, couple of hundred bucks. Cost of development tools? On the order of $3000 plus a yearly subscription of a couple of hundred bucks. Information on development? Go buy a few books, another couple of hundred bucks. Developer information? Held close to the vest. The corporation has been known to use undocumented APIs in its own applications that give them an advantage in the marketplace. Oh, and then there's the off chance that if your business does take off and become successful the big company will sweep in and crush you out of the market. Think Mosaic, software firewalls, virus/spyware scanners, desktop search, heck, most anything you see under the Accessories menu was once a small niche market/company.
So, which side is more business/capitalist friendly? I would suggest that you can be pro-Linux without buying into any socialist agenda. The open source movement is about choices, including the choice to be in business and base that business on open technologies, not technologies controlled by a potential competitor.
Project 2007 is not backward compatible. Previous versions of project will not open p-2007 files. The M$ converter tool will be released soon according to their website.
Google and IBM are who’s trying to push everything back up to the cloud. Microsoft made it’s fortune with a distributed architechture and will mostly stay there unless open source destroys the ability to make money on the desktop and forces them up the stack, which I doubt. Pure open source is actually waning right now and Apple is the hot new topic.
Threatening to or burning soneone’s place down is illegal. So is violating someone’s patents, not the other way around.
The free software community is about putting all software companies out of business, and forcing them into support only models. You’ve never read the GNU Manifesto, and the long term plan for a “software tax” to pay for the “free software”?
The change every Damn thing which in truth costs Billions of dollars in lost productivity as workers are forced to learn what they already know how to do. I have the new prod and it is no better but I must waste time learning how to access key funtionalities..There is another model of software development where you get a new package but it looks identical to the old one and slowly over time at your pace adds new form and functonality.
In the time It took to read this you blinked probably 4 time.
In that time Bill Gates earned 56 thousand dollars from MS.
Now you understand why illegals and B1B Visas are so important... Money is tight..real tight for Billionaires on a budget.
W
Not exactly true because MS lets you download for free, an 07 compatibilty patch/fix.
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