Windows Vista and Office 2007 Launch: Important?

As announced by Anne over on Web Worker Daily: Windows Vista and Office 2007 have launched.

I am a former MCSE who took the first MS Windows95 class in San Francisco (there were six of us attending), and have rolled out NT 4.0, 2000, and XP. I don’t see any difference between the launch of Vista and these others. That is: MS lovers will jump on the release, and I personally know quite a few folks who have been running the beta. Corporate will yawn and ask “where is the value” and slowly get on the bandwagon… that is IF there is greater stability with this version, and their hardware can run it. Dell and others will start shipping bundled boxes at some point, and reinstallation of older OS will stop making sense in what, 1-2 years or so? For me, I always waited for Service Pack 1 (unless there was an immediate and important business need). I prefer to let others do the bug hunting.

Now Office 2007 will likely follow the same Office trajectory (very similar to the OS upgrade trajectory above). I also know several people who have installed the beta or even the most recent live release. But this breaks things! Resource requirements loom large. So again, until it becomes part of the defacto bundle, fahgeddaboudit!

In terms of the functionality or use value, what about Firefox with its myriad extensions, as well as web services sprouting like mushrooms after a hard rain, and the increasing use of network storage, such as Amazon’s S3 (with 0.15/mo gb storage used/mo. and 0.20 gb transferred/mo.), or the great deal from Site5 that provides 55gb of storage for $5/mo (with Flashback, a backup solution which simply does snapshots of every version of every file), not to mention Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets (http://docs.google.com/) and Java apps like Thinkfree which finally get Java right as a network/desktop app and pretty much emulate MS Office with remote storage? Hmmm, I am thinking yeah, we all will have Office 2007 at some point, but Office 2010? Maybe not…

Related posts:

  1. McNeill Minute for Wednesday, 2007-10-03
  2. Autoplay using USB as attack vector – disable in Windows XP
  3. Beta LibX Firefox toolbar extension for UH Manoa library patrons
  4. Surface computing and enchanted objects
  5. Minimum Computing Environment – Windows Edition

December 2, 2006 • Posted in: applications, web

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