Columnists’ Corner: Oliver Rist takes a look inside the first beta of Microsoft’s Office 12 and finds “a dramatic new UI and unprecedented support for end-user customization.” The company also vowed that it will submit Word, Excel and PowerPoint document formats, under the moniker Office Open XML, to the ISO standards body. In First Look: Office 12 shows a bright new face, Rist explains that giving more power to the end-users is one thing, but the question of who will control Microsoft Open XML, now, that’s another issue altogether. Quoteworthy: Microsoft said it will offer its Word, Excel and PowerPoint document formats as open standards. But, can an open standard be owned by one corporation? On one hand I applaud the move as a strategic monopolistic tactic to protect market share, but on the other hand find it typical of Microsoft to pay lip service to open-ness while not giving up any control. Maybe they should have called it “shared standards” — oh, wait there is no sharing involved, hence my previous sarcasm. — Dave Rosenberg, in Microsoft — where open standards aren’t actually open. Hot review: Load testers are one way to prep your Web apps for stellar performance. Maggie Biggs examines three of these products. “Strong, ongoing emphasis on performance testing can keep budgets in check and reduce production issues,” Biggs writes. While they all serve the same master, each of the tested products meets a different set of customer requirements. Security: SANS Institute, while compiling its annual SANS Top 20 list, found that hackers are refocusing to target backup software and network devices because users are not patching those aggressively enough. One in four U.S. consumers, meanwhile, will not shop online this year for fear that their personal information will be sold to a third-party, according to a survey from Forrester Research. Technology Industry