THE HELP DESK BY RICHARD FRISCH MICROSOFT OFFICE CHARACTER 2007 Sunday, March 25, 2007 (RHFtech exclusive news)
Microsoft Office Character 2007, a new product, is expected to be released this week. The Library of Congress, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and confidential sources inside Microsoft and inside Congress, confirm that Microsoft is going forward with project ZtAI, also known as the Zed to Alpha Initiative. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, considers this his ultimate capriole in his decades‐long attempt to seize control of the Application Programming Interface (API) and User Interface (UI) for all Latin alphabet based languages. Retail box for Office Character
Microsoft has refined its skill in controlling APIs and UIs over the past two decades. 2007 This intellectual property (IP) provides them with incredible advantage in the technology business. They have now chosen to apply this skill to implementing ZtAI. They secretly perfected ZtAI in the development of the Vista operating system. In fact, ZtAI is at the heart of the reason for the extended and often delayed development effort required to bring Vista to market. ZtAI also explains why so many other vendors of applications and hardware for the Microsoft Windows ecosystem are still having trouble adapting their products to Vista.
Many computer users do not appreciate the advantage Microsoft has gained through control of APIs and UIs. The results of their highly advanced APIs can be seen in action everyday on any Windows PC. The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), application crashes, unexplained freezing of mice and keyboards, the impossible effort required to set up the simplest of local area networks (LAN), the need to update updates to updates to updates are examples of their prowess in APIs. Microsoft has engineered many subtle uses of the UI to gain their monopoly. The placement of the Start button and taskbar on the bottom of the Window is one of their earliest UI efforts. This was so successful that it forced Apple to place their menu at the top of the window just to differentiate themselves. Another fine example of their skill at turning the world upside down is the placement of the letter tabs in the Outlook Contacts page on the unnatural right side rather than on the left side. Yes, the Latin alphabet languages are read left‐to‐right, top‐to‐bottom but that is meaningless to the VIPs and engineers at Microsoft. They scoff at public domain APIs or UIs and tirelessly develop methods to corrupt the public domain to their benefit. Their most recent forays into redefining UIs can be seen in Internet Explorer 7 where the menu is hidden from the user, and in the redesign of the menu and toolbar structure of Office into the Office 2007 ribbon UI. This is perhaps their finest achievement yet in taking control of a UI and making users learn new ways of doing those things they already know how to do. ZtAI is even bigger. If it succeeds, and your correspondent harbors little doubt that Microsoft’s billions have bought Congressional and Presidential approval, the English alphabet will be recast from ‘A to Z’ to ‘Z to A’. Furthermore, Microsoft has secretly applied for patents, trademark and copyright ownership of Z to A. There was much discussion in Microsoft about a product name to apply to the revised Microsoft‐owned alphabet. Many Microsofties argued for omegabet or zedabet as the brand name for Z to A. However, simplicity won. The new name for all Latin alphabet languages’ characters will be Microsoft Office Character 2007. The internal Microsoft name will be Office Character 12, to keep version numbers synced in Office applications. The US, UK, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish and Texas versions will all be released simultaneously.
Contrary to rumors seen at Mary Jo Foley’s ZDNet blog All about Microsoft and Paul Thurrot’s Winsupersite.com, and echoed at LifeHacker and thousands of other feed sites, no use of the Microsoft Live brand is envisioned. Needless to say, this rumor is DOA. However, a similar initiative for numbers and code‐named 9‐to‐0 is in the works and expected to be released with the next Mac version of Microsoft Office. We secured a copy of Karl Rove’s draft bill. It establishes April 1, 2007 as the date for the new law. After that, all use of letters in telephone directories, encyclopedias and other lists will have to conform to this new order and pay royalties to Microsoft. Copyright ©2007 Richard H. Frisch and Financial Alliance, LLC. All rights reserved.