5. For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction. - Murphy's Laws of Computing

News Archive - July 2005 - News Post

Windows Vista, Office 2003 and Smiley Patents

Monday 25th July 2005

Category: News

It's all Microsoft news today. First of all, Longhorn, the next version of Windows, is now known as Windows Vista. It isn't particularly exciting - I personally would have just settled for Windows 2006 or whichever year it turns up in. However, the name Vista does make things more interesting since a company has been called Vista since May 2000 - perhaps Microsoft should have done a little more research beforehand? They even own the domain name Vista.com! Unsurprisingly, Vista is considering legal action.

That other popular Microsoft product known as Office has also got some attention, although not nearly as much as Windows. Microsoft are aiming high with sales before the next release of Office, but is it too high? Right now, only 15% of computers use Office 2003. Read more at the Register.

Finally, Microsoft are trying to patent custom emoticon creation. This seems quite absurd to me - it's like Microsoft trying to patent 0s and 1s because they use them so much (well, maybe not quite the same, but you get the idea!).

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