Geek Drivel

Microsoft finally woke up and realized that people aren’t going to pay their usual rate for OEM copies of Windows when the PC itself is under $200, so they’ve decided to allow those computers to run Windows XP — the previous (and in many peoples’ opinion, better) version of Windows — instead of ceding the market to Linux. I don’t think it’s going to help them though.

Rumor has it that they’re frantically pushing to get the post-Vista version of Windows (presently simply called “Windows 7″) out as quickly as they can. That might help them stave off obsolescence, if they drop the user-hostile DRM code and produce something at least as good as Windows XP SP2… but I wouldn’t take bets on it.

Speaking of Microsoft’s arrogance when it comes to following existing standards, the results of the ISO vote on their unnecessary OOXML have been leaked, and it looks like they won approval… though a number of people in the know are saying that they played fast and loose with the rules to do so.

No surprise there, they had to win in order to keep MS Office relevant to governments. Many large businesses have to use it because governments do, and many small businesses and individuals have to use it because larger businesses they deal with do. And everyone has to use Windows — Microsoft’s only other cash cow — in order to use MS Office.

MS is trying desperately to stop, or at least slow, the open-source domino effect that’s taking an ever-larger bite out of their business and profits. Winning this vote was crucial to that, so they couldn’t have played fair even if they were inclined to do so. So we’re now stuck with yet another standard, something we needed “like a goldfish needs a bicycle.”

At least MS will have to turn it over to a standards body now.

UPDATE: The EC is looking into the irregularities.

I received an odd newsletter e-mail this morning. Odd because it looked like a perfectly legitimate newsletter, but it was from an outfit calling itself IDG Connect and claiming that I’m a “valued customer.” I’d never heard of the company before this, so far as I know, so I did some research.

It’s hard to find much information on them, other than their own website, but I finally discovered two comments on a mostly-unrelated Computerworld blog post. The first says:

I just happened on this blog, Googling to see if anyone else has trouble and/or was entered into the “challenge/response unsubscription loop from hell” while trying to unsub from IDG Connect…a newsletter I never subscribed to.

Well, these things do happen, and it might still be a legitimate mistake. But directly under that comment was this one:

I am unable to unsubscribe to IDG as well - I’ve tried using the option they listed in the email since they appeared to be a legit operation, but the only result is that now I get emails from them every day, not just once in a while.

So much for the theory that they’re legitimate. I’ll start training my spam filter to block their crap.

I’m writing this entry in the hopes that other people looking for information on this company (or trying to find out why they’re being spammed by them) will discover it, since there’s so little easily-accessible information about them.

This has to be an April Fool’s gag — Microsoft would never put anything into the public domain, no matter how minor, and Office (one of its two major cash cows) most especially. But it was fun for the first couple paragraphs.