Vista Service Pack 1 Almost Live

By: Mike Howard
Today vista has released its first service pack called sp1. The service pack will bundle up all of the previous annoying updates and also address specific reliability and performance issues that have been addressed. The Service Pack will focus on three main categories-

1. Quality improvements, including all previously released updates, which address reliability, security, and performance.
2. Improvements to the administration experience, including BitLockerTM Drive Encryption (BDE).
3. Support for emerging hardware and standards, such as an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and an Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT).

Hopefully this update will address many of the performance issues that is holding back many people from switching to vista. Vista runs great, but many people have complained that Vista is just not nearly as fast as their old XP. I hope to see Vista’s update add some new features because people feel that Vista does not offer enough for the hefty price tag.

If you are looking to get your hands on this new beta and see what it offers the beta will be released in the coming weeks to a large group of testers via MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The beta is already live to a small group of testers right now to look for any major bugs.

You can expect to see the official SP1 to be available in the first quarter of 2008.The release date will not be final till the beta is up and running for sometime to make sure for a high quality release.

More information about Vista SP1

Microsoft Faces New Office Suite Competitor

With Microsoft raking in billions of dollars from its desktop software franchise, many of their competitors are beginning to produce their own solutions to Microsoft Office. Not only is Microsoft feeling the heat from OpenOffice.org, but IBM has jumped into the fray and released a free office productivity suite called Lotus Symphony.

Although Microsoft has sold over 71 million licenses in the last year, they expect their sales to decrease. When many users are faced with a decision between a 400$ Microsoft Office product, or a free suite that produces many of the same functions, they will at least try the free solution. As the US economy continues to struggle it's hard for consumers to ignore such a good value in the software market.

With Microsoft facing such huge competitors such as IBM and OpenOffice.org, Microsoft will soon have to re-write the standard in the desktop software industry, or risk further loss of market share. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds.

Source: ZDNet