but then some marketing idiots – this has to be Balmer – decides to turn lite into “Starter” – start what? and standard into “Premium” – with no standard at all to compare to. and the third-world give-away as “Home Basic” – whose home for heaven’s sake? meanwhile on the business side, “Professional” actually means lite, the “Ultimate” really isn’t the ultimate one with all features, which is “Enterprise” instead. huh?

i mean you couldn’t make this sh*t up. Overall, when you look at how MS names everything, all its programs and products and services, it’s a total f’ing mess. my god.

Since you’re supposed to install your copy of Vista Ultimate on only one computer for $230 odd I think the comparison between that and the $90 OEM version is still valid. It is good for people to know they have the alternative of the OEM.

Vista’s editions always seemed a bit absurd. Microsoft was definitely guilty of excessive greed in their pricing, too. I think Apple’s pricing is enormously more sensible and they should have stuck with something similar, even for Ultimate.

D

What amazes me today is to see businesses – some very big – using critical applications written in Excel or Access. (Excel?? Access??) Excel is full of calculation errors. I showed some of my clients for fun – to make them understand what was at stake.

As with the Y2K time, I anticipate a coming MsOffice crisis, where many businesses will rush to review their precious code in order to migrate it to appropriate tools RDB. There will be work for many ;-)

Funny to think that in 1991 I was writing Excel simple front end tools (running on Macs SE30) for powerful back end and middleware applications running on HP/UX (HP9000). Worked a treat already. Didn’t work quite as well on Windows 3.1, WFW, or NT.

Anyway, a little long to say that people are slowly already getting the message. MsOffice is no longer an all-inall, king of the road kind of application. So many compatibilities between Office version document formats are getting many tired.