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Showing posts from November, 2008

The end of Monolithic Office suites?

--> In previous post I compared Microsoft's Office 3.1 Word to Microsoft's Office 2003 Word. --> Many people would argue that the comparison is meaningless: IT is evolving and a version ten years younger is surely better. It includes enhancements based on experience and users requirements and bug fixes and evolution of the vendor's infrastructure and techniques. Let us ask another question: Which Microsoft Windows Operating System is better XP or Vista ? I am not sure that experts will agree that the newer Vista is better. I would suspect that even the vendor's experts opinions vary: some Microsoft 's experts probably will argue that XP is a better operating system. T he popularity of a downgrade option to XP is another indication that Vista may not always be better than XP. --> The speculations about Microsoft's intention to skip Vista 's evolution and release Windows 7 earlier than planned could sustain my thesis:...

: Microsoft's Word: 3.1 vs. Microsft's Word 2003

The question which Microsoft Word product is better seems ridiculous. We expect an evolution and improvement of a software product. Microsoft produced Office 95 , Office 97, Office 2000 and Office XP . All these versions followed Office 3.1 (which was produced in the beginning of the nineties under Windows 3.1 Operating System ). The answer is not as simple as the question. Probably Word 2003 is better unless you use a spelling checker for documents including text in more than one language. Maybe Word 3.1 spelling checker is functionally limited and not user friendly but at least it is doing the job. Using spelling checker in Word 2003 could lead to unpredictable results: Sometimes it will do the job and sometimes a buffer overflow will cause abnormal end of Word. The post titled Zen and the Art of MS Office Problem Determination in my blog was relatively popular and some of the readers added comments. The reason for the relatively large number of readers is simpl...

Oracle's BEA acquisition SOA perspective – Revisited again

A Keynote presentation titled O racle Fusion Middleware and BEA: an inside Look – Product Strategy , may clarify some of Oracle 's SOA directions discussed in a post immediately after the acquisition and a follow up post. It is a presentation on SOA products strategy as well as to other related products strategy. The approach is to define mix of BEA and Oracle products as strategic components composing Oracle's SOA platform. The leading brand name is Oracle Fusion., however in some areas Oracle offerings include two competing products: Oracle's and BEA's. In other cases one of product is a preferred solution. The most relevant slide is presented above. This slide presents a SOA suit. In my opinion, although quantitatively more Oracle components are included, the most significant elements are BEA's products. The ESB is BEA's Aqua Logic and Complex Events handling is based upon BEA's product. It should be noted that not all SOA infr...