Microsoft made a lot of promises before the release of Vista and made a lot of promises right after it released.  Not many of those have come to pass, not even the promise of "Ultimate Extras" which were to be additional add-ons, games and special features for users of Vista Ultimate.

Back in late October of last year, Microsoft delivered on some of its original promises and to date, one Vista Ultimate extra has been released and all the others are in an indefinite holding pattern.

So far all Microsoft has done is promised to ship ultimate extras at some point by saying to Information Week, "We plan to ship a collection of additional Windows Ultimate Extras that we are confident will delight our passionate Windows Vista Ultimate customers."

Read more at vista.blorge.com 

A day after Microsoft Corp. accidentally sent a patch to some users running the Windows Vista operating system, the company updated the preview release of Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) to a small group of testers, the company confirmed today.

"Microsoft [has] released the latest prerelease build of SP1, Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh, to approximately 15,000 beta testers," a spokeswoman said in an e-mail this morning. "This group includes corporate customers, consumer enthusiasts, software and hardware vendors, and others. The code is not available for public download."

Four weeks ago, Microsoft made Vista SP1 Release Candidate available to the general public for the first time. The 15,000 testers, however, had earlier beta versions to work with, as well as this most recent update.

The company has slated Vista SP1 for final delivery this quarter, and today said it remained on track. "We are still on schedule to deliver SP1 RTM in Q1 [calendar year 2008]," said the spokeswoman.

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Many moons ago I tried using Windows for a week to see how the other half live. Despite my thorough openness and fairness, I still got criticized! (Well, it wouldn’t be the free software community if people didn’t, I suppose!) So, when I needed I new PC I decided to take the plunge and buy one. For the first time ever I bought a PC from a shop, instead of building it myself. Consequently, it came with Vista pre-installed. So I decided to spend a week with it to see what had changed…

After booting up, and entering the time, date, and time zone, I started playing around. Well, there’s not much I can do with an operating system without software, so I copied some from my home server. At least – I tried to copy some. Vista wants to study every file in question before it begins to copy it, which is annoying to say the least. It also seemed to take significantly longer than it should, and eventually timed out. And by “significantly longer”, how does 5 minutes for 2 MB file sound? I’m not sure how fast your gigabit Ethernet is, but I expect more from mine!

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine 

Are you still using Microsoft Office 2003? If so, get ready to have problems opening older file formats with it once SP3 is applied: Microsoft has decided to disable file parsers for the older file types (Word 95 and older, Wordperfect, Lotus etc.) by default. Why? Security reasons.

Of course, the parsers are merely disabled. As it stands, that is the default behaviour under Office 2007 too. You can re-enable them using registry edits.

But why would you go through such trouble?

Documents and security

More often than not, security in documents is decried when it comes to macro management; Office 97 SR-1 was the first Microsoft Office suite to mandate disabling macros on load. Subsequent versions added the ability to sign macros and locations, so as to create/store “trusted” documents.

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine 

It looks like the head of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Chief Nicholas Negroponte is not only alienating Intel, but Microsoft, too.

A day after published reports quoting Negroponte as saying OLPC XO laptops would dual boot Linux and Windows, Microsoft is denying that the company is pursuing such a plan. According to a statement from a Microsoft spokesman:

    “While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop. As we announced in December, Microsoft plans to publish formal design guidelines early this year that will assist flash-based
    device manufacturers in designing machines that enable a high-quality Windows experience.

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IN HIS KICKOFF keynote performance at the CES 2008 show in Las Vegas on Sunday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates proudly announced that the company sold more than 100 million copies of Windows Vista in the first year of its availability.

However, InformationWeek shrewdly notes that, while that's a little more than 10 per cent more copies than the upwards of 89 million copies of Windows XP sold in its first year starting in late 2001, the PC market has almost doubled in size in the interim.

It quotes Gartner that PC shipments totaled 132.4 million units in 2002 and are expected to reach 255.7 million units in 2007. Licking a pencil and applying it to paper, InformationWeek roughly figures that Windows XP captured 67 per cent of the new PC market in 2002, while Windows Vista takeup on new PCs shipped in 2007 amounted to only 39 per cent.

Read more at theINQUIRER 

It's hard to catch decent news in Redmond these days. And with the news of the freshly departed Microsoft CIO, one has to wonder who is next in line to replace him? Yet the question remains – what was the actual event that got him fired? One unconfirmed source indicates that it was inappropriate behavior directed at other members of the staff, while another source indicates something was in conflict with his handling of company secrets.

The Big Question: Why Was His Departure So Publicly Known? In an obvious move to make the man seem 'toxic' for recruitment elsewhere in this industry, I have to wonder if he might have been in talks for a position with a competitor. Again, not knowing Microsoft's policies on competitive hiring practices, I'm just speculating. But it certainly would help to explain why it has been so easy to find out about this recent termination.

Read more at OSWeekly 

Is your honeymoon with Windows Vista over? Long for the days of XP? Peter Ehm provides a few simple steps to bring back the glory of XP.

You’ve bought a new PC with Windows Vista installed. Or you’ve upgraded to a version of Vista from your pokey XP installation. After a few days of getting used to the new and improved operating system in all its glory, you decide you hate it. You long to return to the good, old and reliable Windows XP, be it nostalgia or simple nausea from Aero, Vista’s cutesy candy interface.

Here’s how to do it in a few simple steps.

What you’re about to read is a one-way solution. You can also consider creating a dual-boot configuration, which allows users to pick a bootable choice of both operating systems (XP and Vista) to be installed on the same machine at the same time. That option is somewhat too complicated.

Read more at InformIT

Let me say "no" immediately so as not to engender accusations of hopping on the sensationalism bandwagon (I think it is stuck over at Scoble's house today anyway).

But Matt Asay's post at CNET the other day certainly offers up some food for thought on the debate that Microsoft's latest operating system has kicked off in the market place, and asks whether it's just a terrible product (it's not; just mediocre) or whether people are realizing, inevitably, that with Web 2.0 and SaaS taking up increasing amounts of their workload, using a bloated, insecure, processor and RAM intensive operating system as your primary interface with the lightweight web doesn't make the most sense (they're not).

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Microsoft plans to ship two patches on Jan. 8 to patch code execution vulnerabilities in its newest OS.
Microsoft's first Patch Tuesday for 2008 will be unusually quiet.

The Redmond, Wash. software maker plans to ship just two security bulletins on Jan. 8 to patch code execution vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system.

One of the two bulletins will be rated "critical," Microsoft's highest severity rating. The second is rated "important."

According to information in the company's advance notice mechanism, the "critical" bulletin affects all versions of Windows, including Windows Vista.

The second issue, described as a privilege escalation risk, affects Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Read more at eWeek