Microsoft on Thursday pushed back the release date of Office 2008 for Mac until January, a delay from an earlier promise to deliver the new suite this year.
"It was clear from our June and July quality checkpoints that no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't release our product in time for the Christmas season with the kind of quality we wanted," said Craig Eisler, the development group's general manager, on the team's blog.
The new mid-January debut to retail would correspond with Macworld Expo, Apple's big conference and trade show, which is slated for Jan. 14-18 in San Francisco.
Microsoft won a small victory in its strategic campaign to make its Office Open XML file formats into a global standard when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issued its expected endorsement of the formats Wednesday.
The acceptance of a two-standard approach came even though the state received 460 comments ? mostly negative -- during a three week comment period that began in early July. Massachusetts had previously signed off on the use of the OpenDocument Format or ODF as its primary document standard.
Talk about getting antsy. Microsoft has only just begun Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008, but it's already preparing the first community technology preview, or CTP, of that product's successor.
Visual Studio 2008 -- previously codenamed Orcas after an island in Puget Sound north of Seattle -- officially entered its second beta test phase last week. That product is on track for release possibly as soon as the end of the year, although its "official" launch won't come until February 27.
With the goal of generating applications from simple models an elusive goal, Microsoft and others are working on technology to make it a reality.
Some say the possibility of delivering applications from models exists today in the form of the UML and MDA (Model-Driven Architecture). But the use of tools supporting these technologies typically require serious expert involvement, some observers say.
Richard Mark Soley, chief executive of the Object Management Group, located in Needham, Mass., which oversees many of the modeling specifications such as UML and MDA, said developing applications via modeling is entirely feasible.
On the last day of July, Microsoft made available to testers a new Community Technology Preview build of its SQL Server 2008 database, code-named "Katmai."
The July CTP build comes one month after the June CTP. Microsoft is expected to test SQL Server 2008 primarily, if not exclusively, via CTPs, which are not full-fledged beta builds, but more like interim updates.
Microsoft has been talking about SQL Server 2008 features by categorizing them in a handful of buckets: "Pervasive insight, "dynamic development," enterprise data platform and beyond relational." On the Microsoft Connect site, theres a great slide listing specific SQL Server 2008 features that Microsoft introduced in the June CTP and what it added into the July CTP.
Microsoft has released a long-awaited Web interface for Team Foundation Server. The Power Tool, dubbed Team System Web Access, is based on technology Microsoft acquired in March from DevBiz.
The company had already made the 1.0 and 2.0 versions of DevBiz's TeamPlain tool available for download, but did not provide customer support, according to a blog post from Brian Harry, a Microsoft distinguished engineer.
Team System Web Access was built atop the TeamPlain 2.0 codebase, Harry wrote, which Microsoft teams have extended with a series of changes.
Microsoft is looking to get more of its technology certified as an industry standard and has submitted its HD Photo technology to the Joint Photographic Expert Group for a decision in that regard.
JPEG, a working group of the International Organization for Standardization, has decided to introduce a new work item for the standardization of Microsoft's HD Photo file format, tentatively titled "JPEG XR"; formal balloting of this work item is being submitted to the JPEG national delegations for approval.
Microsoft said it is in "active discussions" to resolve an eight-year patent dispute that had resulted in a $521 million jury verdict against it.
A retrial in the case, scheduled to begin Monday in Chicago, has been put on hold for a month.
The dispute centers on a feature within Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser that allows embedded links. The patent is owned by the University of California and licensed to Eolas Technologies Inc., a closely held company formed by university researcher Michael Doyle.
Microsoft is beset with competition from all sides, unlike any it has seen in decades, and Bill Gates, who co-founded the company 32 years ago, still intends to step away next year as planned.
But so far, Gates, Microsoft's 51-year-old chairman, shows no sign of fading away.
One year into a planned two-year transition, there are few visible cues that Gates is ready to leave the world's technology stage to devote his energies principally to the $33 billion foundation he established seven years ago with his wife.
For years Microsoft kept its "shared source" distinct from the broader open-source movement, but now the company is seeking official blessing for its work from the organization that bestows official open-source status.
The company said last week at the O'Reilly's Open Source Conference that it's submitting its shared-source licenses to the Open Source Initiative, which judges whether new licenses meet its criteria for listing. Increasingly, the organization also is trying to cut down on the number of open-source licenses, too, which is a problem for programmers who don't want legal obstacles in the way of source code sharing.