So I come in to the office today and Thomas has a great story for me.
It seems the big guy finally downloaded and burnt himself a Vista disc so he could install it to a spare machine. He burnt this Vista Install disc on his laptop. And then went off and had dinner and forgot about it until this morning.
Overnight, something ran automagically which required a reboot of his laptop. Can you guess what happened next? That's right kids, Vista really is this easy to install. After a morning of driver and network fun, things are working okay. But man, talk about an angry dude when he saw the cute new login screen this morning.
The MS-Word on the street is that the Office 2007 Professional (but not Pro+ or higher) bits are now available to MSDN subscribers. Thursday is still the day that the floodgates open for the other "smart client" SKUs and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 products.
For packaged software (but who buys off-the-shelf anymore?), the release-to-manufacturing date remains November 30.
So you'd like to learn about these live and up close? Come to the biggest launch ever! It's a Microsoft LOVE-fest, with Live, Office, Vista and Exchange all released at the same time.
And, you haven't heard about the Zune yet? It's here. Well, not here in Canada. But it's now on the market south of the border. Can't wait to get my hands on one, it's truly the mix of features I want, I just hope the desktop experience for managing media kicks the iPod's as much as I hope it does.
Incidentally, I got my daughter a Sandisk Sansa e200 for her birthday and she loves it. Beyond a good battery life and not having to wrangle with our battery recharger anymore, the killer feature for her is the built-in mic that lets her record herself (or songs off the built-in radio). I like it too, because her songs are waay better than radio. It also does colour photos and videos (small, but it does 'em) and she had the controls figured out in 10. Win, win,win. They just released 6 and 8Gb models. This thing kicks the nano around the block, highly recommended.