Monday, May 25, 2009
A Problem Has Been Detected With Your Classified Mission. Windows Has been Shut Down to Prevent Damage to Your Computer.
How slow are government agencies at adopting new technologies? So slow that the U.S. Army is planning a major upgrade of its information systems–to Microsoft’s Windows Vista OS. Though Windows 7 is expected at market by the end of the year, the United States military has set that as a deadline for its migration from Windows XP to Windows Vista and from Office 2003 to Office 2007.
If there was an over-arching theme for this last week on All Things D, it would have to be musical chairs.
Microsoft has a far easier time meeting legal deadlines than software ship dates, doesn’t it? The European Commission today said the company met its deadline to respond to charges that its bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows violates European competition laws.
A look back at the week during which approximately 40 percent of the posts were about Twitter. Or at least it seemed that way.
“Talk is cheap,” EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes once said. “Flouting the rules is expensive.” Truer words, especially for Microsoft, which may soon face significant penalties abroad for bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser and Windows OS.
There’s a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat and at least one zero-day exploit for them in the wild already. Yet Adobe won’t have a fix in place until March 11, and then only for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9. Patches for earlier versions of the software will arrive sometime after that.
Looks the three-hour deposition Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave in the so-called “Vista Capable” class action suit was for naught. A judge Wednesday ruled that the lawsuit, which has troubled Microsoft for nearly two years now, cannot go forward as a class action.
Microsoft’s new ad campaign–the one designed to “address any lingering doubts the company’s customers may have about Windows Vista”–doesn’t seem to be doing the company much good. According to that ChangeWave survey I mentioned in an earlier post, 48 percent of respondents said they prefer Windows XP to Vista. Just 33 percent said they prefer Vista.
Microsoft’s renewed antipiracy push isn’t currying much favor among PC users running pirated software. In China, a nation where 82 percent of all software is unlicensed, many are lambasting the company over its Windows Genuine Advantage program, which blackens the desktop backgrounds of PCs running unlicensed copies of Windows and pesters their owners with constant warning messages.
