The IT Skeptic - Comments for "The Microsoft evil genius of docx format"

bloated Microsoft software

skeptic — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:42:06 +0000

The compatibility pack to allow Office 2003 to read 2007 format files is 27MB! For a format convertor...

Ranting against Microsoft is like flatulence in a Highveld storm

Red Pineapple — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:57:00 +0000

In this neck of the Kalahari the storms might not have great wind speed but the light and sound show is like no place on earth. Some mates of mine, when they first heard it, dived under the table. Now Microsoft is much the same, great bells and whistles but do they really blow you over? However, the show is so loud and bright no-one notices any other disturbance during the storm.

However, Skep, I noticed you wrote a great piece in ITSMwatch, http://www.itsmwatch.com/itil/article.php/11700_3790896_2 on 12 December. One of your best yet. You should podcast it!

Google Docs is not yet ready

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:09:01 +0000

Google Docs is not yet ready for professional use, I use it a lot private and love it. But there are things like not being able to paste images or not being able to control tables that rules it out of professional use so far. However OpenOffice 3.0 is really good, I suspect that the transition from MS office 2003 to OpenOffice 3.0 will be easier than moving from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007.

Forced upgrades

Daran — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 10:34:02 +0000

This has been Microsofts policy for as long as I remember. At least now they allow you to set the default save format. And of course Office 2007 is a horrible resource hog when compared to 2003.

We had some issues with people from India 'forgetting' to save documents in the old format, still used in our NL office and by the customer. In all such cases we requested them to resend the documents in proper format and rescheduled the meeting by 5-6 hours, meaning it would be 10-12 PM in India. That sure helped with compliance.