Piccadilly Circus, London, England:

Photos snagged from MacFormat.com.uk.

A recent comment on one of the posts here from my friend and fellow P.W.I.T. Jason partly goes “…to hell with all those *.docx and *.xlsx and *.pptx files that people keep sending me.”

Jason’s comment is characteristic of the dissatisfaction with the file format Microsoft is pushing as a standard with the introduction of the new version of Office. On Windows itself it’s been a little problematic, and its compatibility with other apps is spotty, and usually read-only. Development is dog-slow, and people are wondering why.

In particular Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has been unable to release converters for its new formats to allow older versions of Apple’s suites to open Open XML files from Office 2007. A direct result of this difficulty has resulted in the pushing back of the release of the Mac version of the new Office suite to early 2008.

Lo and behold, it had to be Apple itself to break the logjam by being the one, a third party, to manage the feat ahead of Microsoft, the creator of the format. Mac support for Microsoft’s new format has come not from Microsoft, but from Apple, though iWork ‘08, which can Open XML files made with Office 2007.

Talk about beating them at their own game.

More here.

Full disclosure: the Doodler likes Microsoft Office 2008. Having tried it out at launch and using a complimentary trial version for a month, I liked the software suite. Hated Vista, but loved Office. I immediately hoped Mac users would get a version soon. Redmond promised a late Q3 or Q4 2007 release, but it is not to be.

Microsoft has officially announced that the suite’s release will be pushed back to early next year, at the earliest at Macworld in mid-Jan for the launching, and Q1 08 for availability.

Oh well. Better’n nothing.

A recently completed survey by the Eagle Research Group found out that 70% of Zune users surveyed are not happy with their players and intend to switch to either an iPod or to an iPhone as soon as their service contract expires.

36% said that had they known Apple was coming out with the iPhone they never would have purchased a Zune. Also of note is that 3% of the survey respondents were either employees or contractors of Microsoft.

Imagine that.

Something extremely useful for OS X users that they’ve taken for granted for a long while now has finally been updated for Microsoft Windows folk.

Bonjour 1.0.4., formerly Rendezvous, is now available for Windows 2000/2003, XP (with latest service pack) and Vista.

This was first released with Jaguar in 2002, with a not-so-full-featured Windows version released in 2004. What is it, exactly?

Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers.

More details and download link (2.1MB) for Bonjour 1.0.4 here. Users of 64-bit versions of Windows can get theirs here.