Office 2003 SP3 – My how the times have changed

Today is a very good day for Microsoft – they released Service Pack 3 of the flagship product and all the Microsoft world is ajoy. This certainly cements the stability of Office 2003, and for many that have seen my Office 2007 demos, locks down the office productivity to this application suite for years to come. Bink has a breakdown of SP3 downloads, list of known issues when installing SP3, and other good news.

However, outside of the Microsoft world the response is mute.

Microsoft Office 2003 SP3 is not just not the top story of the day, it’s not even the second, the third, or even the fourth most relevant story of the day. Let’s see.. IBM is offering its Office software for free in challenge to Microsoft, Yahoo! just acquired Exchange’s primary competitor in Zimbra, Google is launching Presentations competitor to PowerPoint, and Mozilla foundation is pouring money into an eventual Outlook killer.

Now, Mr. Anderson, can you hear that?

Can you hear the rumbling of the companies that got screwed by Microsoft raising their voices, throwing their cash and their technology on a pile of Microsoft alternatives, right at Microsoft is struggling with its flaghsip operating system, struggling to release heavilly feature-discounted Windows Server 2008, struggling to reassure the customers that SQL Server 2008 is shipping on time.

That, Mr. Anderson, is the sound of inevidability – that of the collateral damage that remained after Microsoft buldozed the business desktop and server space over the past decade – as it seems to be raising up again?

Steve, I hope you don’t believe in karma.