Re: Office 2004 SP1 - What did it Fix??

From: Pierre Igot (latext_at_gmail.com)
Date: 10/18/04 

Date: 18 Oct 2004 14:06:47 -0700

Paul,

As usual, we have MVPs making excuses for Microsoft whenever the
company fails to meet expectations.

Office 2004 was released in May 2004. An update posted in October 2004
doesn't qualify as an "early service release" to me -- although in
Microsoft's twisted sense of time, where it takes decades for bugs to
get fixed, it probably qualifies as "early".

The fact that this release doesn't fix an issue as obvious as the one
with Postscript fonts and the non-breaking space:

http://www.latext.com/pm/betalogue/P1246

is unacceptable. The fact that it doesn't fix the crash triggered by
utilities such as Spell Catcher or TypeIt4Me:

http://www.latext.com/pm/comments/1298_0_1_0_C/

is just bad.

But as usual, Microsoft applies its own twisted logic to user feedback
and comes up with a bloated updater that fixes very little.

And if it did fix stuff that it doesn't tell us about, then it has a
thing or two to learn about company feedback as well. Threat of
litigation my eye. The US department of justice itself wasn't able to
bring MS to justice. It's not likely that any group of users big or
small ever will.

Pierre 

--
Pierre Igot
LATEXT - Literature & Visuals @ www.latext.com
BETALOGUE - Weblog at www.latext.com/pm/betalogue
"Apple Peel" Columnist @ Applelust.com   
> From: Paul Berkowitz (berkowit@spoof_silcom.com)
> Subject: Re: Office 2004 SP1 - What did it Fix?? 
> 
> Office 11.1.0 is not advertised as a major bug-fix release. It was announced
> as a release that fixes security issues and stability, and also happens to
> have some bug fixes, some of which are announced in that KB article and some
> of which, as JE says, were not. The security issues are mostly "potential
> holes" for possible exploits, none of which has occurred and now can'. You
> won't notice anything. Some crashing bugs (rare circumstances) have been
> fixed (the "stability" issues).
> 
> As far as other bugs go, it's the usual thing for an early service release:
> they tried to fix bugs or nuisances that thousands of people have reported,
> if they were easy enough to fix in time. For example, there have been
> countless reports (several hundreds right here on the newsgroups, thousand
> more via MS Error Reporting) about Entourage's icon bouncing repeatedly in
> the Dock when there's a server error. That has been fixed. The Word errors
> you report above, Matt, have probably only been reported by you and maybe a
> couple of others. That wasn't enough to get them high priority, Anything to
> do with VBA is specialist, and quite possibly difficult to fix, to boot.
> 
> MS apparently really is using the Error Reporting (MERP) to find bugs and to
> prioritize. So do, everyone, keep sending in reports.
> 
> MS never  announce update releases in advance. But I'm quite sure they are
> planning more bug fix releases for 2004. 11.1.0 is not the end of it.
> 
> -- 
> Paul Berkowitz
> MVP MacOffice
> Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
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