A lot of Microsoft news can paint a grim picture. The following accumulation of news from the past week will hopefully shed light on the problems Microsoft as a whole is facing. It is well deserved.

This is a roundup of some good news for ODF, collected over the past couple of days.

Bits and pieces about the road to document interoperability and those standing in its way

It seems like our initial reaction was right. It occurred just before finding validation in other sources whose assessment was similar. Here are some bits and pieces that you probably read to consider before falling victim to Microsoft's media blitz.

After Vista SP1, the worst that will happen is a warning notice that forces a 15-second delay at login, and a reminder every hour on the hour to activate.
Gates famously stated in the past that if people pirated an OS he would prefer it to be Windows. Microsoft forgot this for a while, but there is a glimmer of a re awakening. Don't be fooled by the bad product that is Vista. There is a long way to go before Microsoft runs out of money!

Over the past couple of years, Microsoft shops have been increasingly wooed by vendors offering alternatives to Windows, Exchange, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft wares. The competition has grown so fierce that in May, Red Hat went so far as to sue Switzerland (and win).

Not only did Windows Vista - billed by Microsoft as its biggest operating system for 10 years - fail to distinguish Microsoft's latest fiscal year from previous, non-Windows-Vista years, but Microsoft also missed its own expectations by several million dollars.

A few days ago i published a short article describing how Windows Vista would accept incorrect passwords at the login screen. Now, as if God/Microsoft her/himself had intervened, my Vista connected to the network, installed some unspecified update, and the password problem is solved. The weird thing is - Vista refuses to connect to my WLAN, so it shouldn't have been able to get any updates.

After outcry from various constituencies over the past couple of days, Microsoft has pulled from its CodePlex site its Sandcastle project for failure to comply with the terms and conditions required in order to be qualify as bona-fide open source.