Patent lawsuits are filed in the Texas Eastern District because it's patent troll-friendly. It's an honest to god racket that's even credited with fueling the district seat's economic boom.

It's been a while since I actually cried and choked while laughing. Thanks for this, it made my day.

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you have something lined up.

Did you get axed as part of that?

Weird. Maybe it's just old habits not wanting to die. Many "power users" are also extremely resistant to change, and they might be just dumb enough to give up functionality to stay in their safety zones.

You mean the *style* of the start menu of the functionality? I like the XP start menu, but I use the 'classic' theme so it looks more like Windows 2000. This is really a personal preference as I don't really like the XP themes. But the functionality is there, including the "pin list", which is the really valuable thing.

The Vista start menu is far better though. I see KDE4 copied it almost verbatim, except that it took me five minutes to figure out how to run a damn program :)

Innovation and all that.

Yes they are, and Microsoft has known this for a long time.

That's one of the differences between MS software and open source, for example. Microsofts's success lies on carefully picking defaults that cater to the majority of its users. Mostly that has worked for them through the years. Open source applications on the other hand suffer from a sort of tinker syndrome, with millions of possible choices. Of course for the kind of people that use things like KDE (yes I'm looking at you KDE), that's a big plus. Not so for the kind of people who use Office, for example. They just want the damn thing to work out of the box. They see their computers as appliances and the software in them as tools. We see them as cool devices that we spend time tinkering with. It's a cultural thing that FOSS largely does not understand yet.

twitter? Is that you? :)

In my very humble opinion, and as an additional (possibly worthless) data point, people that dislike the ribbon interface are more likely to be "power users" that tinker and customize everything (like me).

The rest of the demographic that tends to use Office software - you know, the millions of corporate users that still have the default background, theme, sounds and everything else that originally came with their laptop or desktop - the ribbon tends to be a little baffling at first and eventually extremely useful to them, because it mirrors the way they work. That's the reason it was designed and why it was introduced with 2007.

Microsoft places much more importance on the latter group and tends to make design decisions based on their working habits and patterns. If you are part of the first group, it's best to get used to that fact.

And of course, there are millions of people still using Office 2003 and even 2000.

Yeah. Way to innovate there, Redmon. Congratulations on entering the 1990s!

Outlook has supported threaded discussion views for email and post folders since the 2000 version. Here's a walk through for 2003. First hit on Google searching for 'outlook threaded view'

While threaded mode is useful for some things, there are other nice ways to visualize your stuff on Outlook that I like.

View -> Arrange By -> Conversation on OLK2003 is essentially the same as GMail mode, for example.

A quick switch to Message Timeline view is also extremely useful in those situations where someone says "it's an email from 03/12/70" or something like that and you want to look quickly at the entire sequence sorted by message rather than simply by date.

The "Show in groups" thing is priceless as a visual aide to stuff that's happened in the last few weeks.

I think Outlook is an example of Microsoft's better software efforts. It has its quirks and limitations of course, but overall it's far better than most other mail clients I've used in the past 15 years. And I'm not even considering Exchange integration here.

Congratulations on getting modded up though. My theory that mod points are being increasingly farmed out to rhesus monkeys and squirrels on steroids continues to pan out.

Working with any Lotus product == fate worse than death.

Ah, even better then. I seem to remember *some* Mozilla browser doing some spoofing (maybe SeaMonkey back in the day) or maybe I'm just confused because I had to spoof in order to make something work.

The Safari bit makes sense since it's the same as Konq AFAIK.

You know, those kinds of situations are good for consulting opportunities. I *do* have a dime for almost every time I've heard "well it currently runs on Excel" or "well, we're using Access databases right now" :)

2001 called and said you can't use that tired old argument anymore. The default install of Firefox since 2.x (I believe) does not spoof IE in the user agent string. Firefox being the largest market share aside from any version of IE, the weight given to any other browser would be a statistical blip at best. In fact, if I remember correctly Konqueror in KDE3 and 4 actually spoofs Gecko by default. And Opera stopped spoofing MSIE after 6.x, IIRC.

Probably heavily locked-down desktops and even more heavily restricted internet access (basically none whatsoever; HTTP is allowed through a proxy that requires a username and password and doesn't allow access to the whole web).

Yes, voodoo magic.

This is quite possible to do in a company of such size because you can usually divide your staff into groups that match up quite well with their responsibilities and grant access accordingly, blocking everything else.

So you're saying that the folks in HR can browse porn, but the ones in IT can't?

When you're dealing with a much smaller organisation, the amount you can lock things down is generally much reduced

I don't see how that's the case. If you do it right you can scale your solution from 10 to 10,000 machines.

Sorry, but I don't think you understand how this works out there in the real world.