I was looking at VistaOffice’s stats today and I got a nice shock when I saw this site featured on the Microsoft Office Beta Community Site. Wow. What an honour. I even spotted a b5media blog on it too (office12watch.com)

Sweet, I’m gonna have a nice lunch today to celebrate this revelation !

I’m delighted to hand over the authorship of Vista Office to Colbert Low who will start blogging here shortly.

Colbert has had a varied career in technology writing for various websites. He is perhaps best known for authoring the gadget blog at Weblog Empire and moving that across to b5media.

I’m pleased to welcome Colbert into the Syntagma Media team.

The first upgrade to Windows for five years, though a bit delayed, should be worth the wait, says Joe Bolger in The Times (London).

For, he writes, “Windows remains at the heart of Microsoft’s business. Twenty-one years after the operating system was launched, it forms the backbone of more than 90 percent of the world’s computers. It accounted for 31 percent of Microsoft’s revenues last year, 66 percent of operating profits, and has helped to sustain the Seattle-based company as an entity worth $281 billion (£162 billion).”

But the company is under attack from all sides. “Open-source developers, who work together and distribute their work free, are gaining increasing traction. Linux-based operating systems are increasingly seen as a viable alternative to Windows software.”

With all the Web-based alternatives to Microsoft’s software, such as Google’s newly-acquired Writely, “could users decide they don’t need a fancy front end to organize what few files they do have on their computer?”

David Weeks, Vista’s UK marketing manager, has other ideas: “People like to share, but they also want to own their content,” he says. “We’re hoarders.”

Bill Gates sees the desktop PC branching out to become an entertainment hub. “The growth in digital photography and the use of digital music players has increased dependence on home computers as an entertainment medium.”

The rising penetration of high-speed internet has fuelled that growth, as users share pictures and files. High-definition video content will also become increasingly accessible, alongside robust demand for online services. At the centre of this hub, Gates hopes there will be a copy of Windows Vista.

An optimistic, but fair, assessment of Windows Vista by Bolger, but the effects of the constant delays, which may not be the last, are rather played down.

David Richards, writing for Australian website Smarthouse, reiterates today his previous contention that Windows Vista is having up to 60 percent of its code rewritten. Here’s the passage:

“Mr Raymond Vardanega, the Marketing Director, of Acer Australia has confirmed independently of SmartHouse Magazine that Microsoft is having major problems with its Vista operating system. He said ‘The decision to delay Vista into the consumer market will have an impact on hardware sales particularly in the Media Centre market. We have been told that Microsoft has bought in programmers from the Xbox team to work on the problems. We have also been told that up to 60% of the code will have some form of re writing or changes made. We are told that Microsoft is concerned at the impact that the delay will have on hardware manufacturers. We have raised our concerns directly with Microsoft.’ ”

Microsoft tech evangelist Robert Scoble commented on this blog that the reorg is true but the rewrite is not. But Microsoft has not rebutted this story officially, and Richards is claiming that a Redmond partner, Acer, albeit the Australian office, is maintaining it’s true.

Come on, Microsoft, tell us what’s going on here. Is it true or is Scoble being set up as a turkey to play for time while Redmond decides how to handle this story? Either way, it’s bad for the company.

Update: Scoble says, Can this week ever end?