Avoid Microsoft's way of trying to preserve lock-in without the proprietary file formats Platforms: “I’m guessing the new [Office 2007] interface is Microsoft’s way of trying to preserve lock-in without the proprietary file formats that used to make it easy,” Bob Lewis postulates in While we’re on the subject of Vista, the fourth in his series about upgrading to the new OS. “Microsoft is in a risky position right now — in much the same place Novell was way back when, when it moved from the Bindery to NDS (Network Directory Services, the predecessor to eDirectory).” We all know how that particular bit of history unfolded. Hence, Lewis asserts, the time is ripe for considering other options.Columnist’s corner: This saga begins with a sort of rhetorical question, if you won’t listen to the IT people you hire, what’s the point of having them in the first place? Instead, our Off the Record author’s boss went with the lowest bid for upgrading a 10Base-T network to 100Base-TX topped off with Cat-5 cabling. “Suddenly stations would go off the net, and when my techs went crawling into the overhead, they’d find cables that were running over fluorescent lights, jacks and patch panels that were not Cat-5 compliant.” When bargain cabling is no bargain. The plot thickens as a new boss opts for a network assessment that doesn’t go so well either.The news beat: Intel claims its forthcoming Penryn desktop chips will run as much as 40 percent faster than current versions when they ship in the latter half of this year. Amazon.com’s groundbreaking Web services business is losing money, according to CEO Jeff Bezos. Sun, Fujistu and Hitachi all detail new servers. And Xerox brings 15 printers to market. Best of the blogs: VMware issues the first public beta of its benchmarking tool, VMmark. “Some of the more important changes include the distribution of virtual appliances for the Linux-based workloads, distribution of an XML-based open-source benchmarking harness for STAF/STAX, reduction of the memory footprint from 7GB per tile to 5GB per tile and replacement of the database workload with SysBench running against MySQL,” David Marshall explains in The Virtualization Report. Software Development