Maybe it’s just that I’m tired after a bit of travel, or perhaps it’s the downtown smog, but I’m just not in a happy mood this afternoon. The week is ending on a low.

I’m talking of course about the latest stock market news (which I’ve been blissfully disconnected from for the last day or so).

Here’s the damage (in case you too have been out of the loop). The markets are down again! Just when we started to think they’d perhaps hit a bottom, no, they’ve gone further south.

Here’s how they are stacking up:

Microsoft (green) is holding up OK, compared to the Dow (blue) and Nasdaq (yellow), whilst Google (purple) is feeling some pain and Apple (red) is getting smashed.

Surely it must getting close to buying time soon!.

OK, I’ve got to catch up on some sleep now. Perhaps this is all a bad dream.

Microsoft stock has weathered the current economic downturn pretty well we have to say. But that hasn’t stopped it hitting a few new lows over the last 2 weeks.

With a market capitalisation under $200B now, and expected forecast cuts coming, this really is a stock to look at buying soon. Wait for the results, and most likely a further fall, and then start buying up we say! (And thanks to WinBeta for the links)

Microsoft have strong product suites across multiple areas, and must surely be a strong contender when the markets to pick up (but as usual take our opinion on financial matters with a grain of salt). They will endure this climate well, and be ideally placed to pick up innovative technology companies cheaply in the coming months.

Thanks to Mary-Jo (who in turn thanked WinBeta) we have this post from the Office Sustained Engineering blog, announcing that Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be available between February and April 2009.

They’ve previously noted that SP2 would include support for Open Document Format (ODF), XML Paper Specification (XPS) and Portable Document Format (PDF) – you’ll be aware that some of these are supported via separate add-ons at present.

However, these also a raft of new features, including the following:

For Office Desktop Programs:

• Improved Outlook Calendaring Reliability
• Improved Outlook Performance
• Enabling Object Model support for Charts in PowerPoint and Word
• Improved cryptographic functionality by supporting all cryptographic algorithms offered by the operating system
• Improved functionality in Excel’s charting mechanism
• Ability to ungroup SmartArt graphics (and as a result, the ability to add animations to them in PowerPoint)
• Ability for Visio to export UML models to an XML file compliant with the XMI standard
• Tool that enables the uninstall of Office client Service Packs

For Servers:

• Performance and manageability improvements to variations in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) including STSADM commands for repairing links between source and target pages
• Improvements around processing status approvals from Office Project Web Access into Office Project Professional 2007
• Improvements to read-only content databases and index rebuild timer jobs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Source: Office Sustained Engineering

This is awesome news. Why? Because this is much more than a few fixes. Take one of these items as an example: Visio UML export to XMI compliant formats. This is a big task, and yet they’ve chosen to do it even though the usage will likely be minimal. Or what about adding object model support for Charts. Another big item.

Fair enough, things like improving Outlook Performance are much needed, but in general we are impressed with how extensive the ongoing support and improvement that Microsoft provides is.

Keep up the great work.

This month’s security updates indicate that IE6 has a few problems (Critical rating), and IE7 is looking pretty good (just Important rating). Further, if you were to base your view solely on the numbers you could be fooled into thinking that IE8 is a more secure browser (as some have been) due it not having any patch this month.

Whilst we’d love to believe that, the reality is far more likely to be that hardly anyone is using it yet, and thus no significant security flaws have been discovered so far. Give it time we say.

When we reported on Microsoft’s use of the term ‘Apple tax’ we didn’t have any concrete figures at hand. We just knew it had to be correct.

Thankfully Ed Bott has been through the process first hand and given us a full account of how much extra it costs to run a Mac than it does a Windows box. It’s around $500 for starters.

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Ina Fried reports that the next version of Office may make an appearance at PDC. There’s nothing on the agenda to confirm this, but we’ll let you know if we hear anything further.

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We quite like Mary-Jo’s new series on the Microsoft Big Brains.

Two weeks ago it was Gary Flake. He’s the Director of Live Labs.

Today it was Brian Harry. We’ve been long time devotees of Brian. He’s the man that made TFS cool.

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Give us a fucking break! Check out this load of shite from Microsoft’s PR hacks (yes, it even has its own virtual Pressroom).

Microsoft Corp. today announced Global Anti-Piracy Day, a simultaneous launch of education initiatives and enforcement actions in 49 countries on six continents to combat the sophisticated, illegal trade of pirated and counterfeit software. The programs announced today include intellectual property awareness campaigns, engagements with partner businesses, educational forums, local law enforcement training, and new legal actions against alleged software counterfeiters and pirates.

Source: Microsoft PressPass

The day aims to provide ‘a 24-hour snapshot of the range of education initiatives and legal actions that take place on an ongoing basis in local markets around the world’.

It’s even got its own tip-off hotline!

Sure, piracy is a problem, and Microsoft (and every other vendor) should work hard to combat it, but announcing a global day is just plain ludicrous. We think this day is much more appropriate.

OK, so not strictly a Microsoft announcement, but definitely of interest following the official release of Silverlight 2 last week.

SilverlightContrib is a collection of open source Silverlight controls and API enhancements. The CodePlex page is here. This latest release is Silverlight 2 compatible.

There is also a demo site showing off the controls. Our favourite is the Cool Menu

We don’t cover all the open source projects out there (there’s thousands) but we do like to promote some of them from time to time.

Microsoft UK is releasing their new Equipt package today (yesterday by the time you read this). We think it’s a lame name, but we like the concept.

It’s a subscription service that offers Office + Live OneCare + Live Workspace + a whole stack of other Live services.

It’s available for a penny under 60 pounds per annum, and you can install each subscription on 3 machines. Note: this is only for home or student users – it’s not a company offering.

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