There’s an interesting piece over on Paul Thurrott’s blog today. Paul is Mr Supersite who specializes in Microsoft software.

He’s been testing both Windows Vista and Office 12 (2007?) for a while now, so what’s his take in the state of readiness of these products?

I’ve been using Office 12 on my main desktops and notebooks since late last year on a regular basis, and I’ve traveled with Office 12 three times so far. It’s fairly stable, but Outlook 12 suddenly coughed up a hairball last week and is now marking every word I type as a spelling error (using those squiggly red lines), thus making the spell check feature useless. And don’t get me started on Windows Vista: I’m working on a Vista book and I’ve had to reinstall Vista on just my main desktop three separate times this week. It’s a real time suck.

He adds a useful snippet on Vista availability after release: “Windows Vista will be made available under the new Windows Anytime Upgrade license, which will allow customers to upgrade to different Vista product editions at will. However, Microsoft has not yet specified how this system will work; presumably, it will be a Web download (or perhaps even a DVD order).”