Microsoft News Tracker

It’s deja vu all over again! From the October 3rd issue of Office Watch:

Oh what a mess. I had foolishly hoped that the days of poorly tested and badly documented Office Service Packs were behind us - silly, silly me.

Office 2003 Service Pack 2 has proved that Microsoft still can’t apply a reasonable level of care to updating one of their major products. Yes, patching a system as complex as MS Office is a difficult task but that’s no excuse for having similar problems year after year.

Regrettably this issue is devoted to sorting out the problems in updating to Service Pack 2 for Office 2003. I say regrettably because we’d really much prefer to talk about what’s good in Office instead of digging around in these messy situations of Microsoft’s own making.

To net it out, users are reporting a variety of maddening installation problems. Take a gander at the list and see if you could explain the fixes to your grandmother.

Meanwhile, Joe Wilcox reports his own problems with SP2 and observes that there’s plenty of opportunity in competing with Office and Microsoft. Which leads up to the buzz about today’s joint Sun and Google announcement (10:30 PDT, 13:30 EDT), which is rumored to be a “Google Office.” According to John Oates at The Register:

Google and Sun are holding a joint press conference this evening to head off an orgy of speculation not seen since Ginger/Segway threatened to overload speculation networks earlier this century.

Stay tuned! But you’ll need RealPlayer.

David Gainer provides a summary list at the Microsoft Excel weblog.