After watching a coworker spend some time figuring out how to open a box of Office 2007 Pro I understand Joel’s frustrations. I don’t know why Microsoft decided to get all cute with their boxes, but isn’t the idea to make it as quick and painless to get to the product for your customer who just shelled out hundreds of dollars? The Office 2007 box looks like a book with its curved edge. If it looks like a book I’d assume it would open like a book. I guess not. For the most part, I’ve liked using Office 2007. Outlook works quite well and I really like Excel 2007.

Joel also had this to say about Vista. I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP pre-installed).

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Office 2007, Windows XP

I’ve documented the horrendous experience I’ve had running Windows Vista on this blog which has caused quite a number of friends, coworkers and people I don’t know to flame me for:

1. Not knowing how to properly configure Vista
2. Having exotic hardware
3. Not having enough patience for drivers to be written
4. (When all else fails) For hating Microsoft

Well, none of those reasons are true and it’s been a bit frustrating wondering if maybe I was doing something wrong with Vista. Maybe there was some magic yet hidden setting I just needed to tweak. I kept looking for the “Just Work” and the “Annoy Me Less” buttons. I never found them.

Well, over the past few days I’ve spoken with two good friends who are both big Microsoft fans. Both work in IT and have been Vista proponents. Yet things have changed. Both had changed their tunes and were in the process of moving back to Windows XP. To quote one friend, “I tried to like Vista. but it pesters me to death and runs slower than XP”. Chris Pirillo correctly notes the record number of MacBooks at Gnomedex this year. 

Although I was feeling a bit of Schadenfreude in all this, it’s too bad that Vista has caused so many problems and wasted so many hours. I still have a few diehard friends that work at Microsoft and are sticking with Vista. The only thing they can offer now is, “Just wait for SP1”. Isn’t that like buying a new car that turns out to be a lemon only to hear the dealer say, “Just wait for the first recall to be issued. That will force them to fix the problems!”.

Kim continues to run Vista on her newer Dell machine. I bought her the game, Shadowrun, which only (this deserves its own post) works on Windows Vista. We’ve tried installing it several times and it refuses to install. This is absolutely absurd.

It sucks to feel locked into anything. I hate the feeling of being locked into a cell phone or broadband contract. And I certainly hate the feeling of being locked into an operating system. As much as I’d like to move to another OS, I’ve invested too much money and time on programs that only run on Windows. I don’t like the idea of running programs in a virtual machine so I get by running XP which works most of the time. Thank goodness.

My only question now is how long till Microsoft yanks XP support and stops pushing out updates and patches?

Update: Former PC Magazine Editor, Jim Louderback, has had enough of Vista too. He writes:

I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.

When I first heard that Microsoft was going to extend Xbox 360 warranties to the tune of $1 billion my first thought was “Very cool”. My second thought was, “Mini is going to go ballistic”.

Well, sure enough Mini chimes in with a few choice quotes:

Now come on, how can you have to put aside $1,000,000,000 to cover faulty Xbox 360s and not go and hold President Bach or VP Moore or VP Allard accountable and fire them…

The only thing I’ve seen the Xbox business accomplish, besides making a lot of money disappear, is make Sony dash themselves against the rocks with the PS3. Monkey-see, monkey-do even better. In the meantime, the Nintendo little piggy gleefully exclaims, “Wii! Wii! Wii!” all the way to the bank.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mini, he is a Microsoft employee who has decided to blog anonymously. It’s not hard to understand this decision after reading a few of his posts.

MSFTextrememakeover asks, “What another $1B among friends?”