Unfortunately, I’m not shocked by this. But I’m still mad has hell about it!

source

Microsoft said Thursday its sales and earnings for the December quarter fell well below expectations and announced a series of cost-cutting moves, including its first-ever companywide layoffs

The software maker said it will cut up to 5,000 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce, over the next 18 months. About 1,400 jobs were eliminated immediately. The software maker is also paring other expenses, such as delaying salary increases and cutting back on vendors and contractors.

Thank you 37signals!

Even before [I signed up for my Backpack account]3, I had been wanting to allow others to comment on some of my todo items on pages that I was sharing. I use my BackPack account as my personal intranet. And I have a page for each of my major topics and some just random bits of information. Most of my projects involve doing some side programming for websites. In order to keep myself organized, I’d like to allow others to view the pages, add todo items or post comments on the items, notes, files that I already have up there. Up until now, it has been rather difficult to do.

Those that work with me know that I am a huge fan of the products put out by 37Signals. They have created some great apps that are simple, clean, and rock solid. The concepts aren’t always new, but they have made it so anyone can login in and hit the ground running. There is a *lot* to be said about that ability to have well design applications. I can’t say enough great things about their apps!

Not many people are aware of this. But “Microsoft Office Communicator hotfixes are not part of Windows Update, so it is important to find and deploy them through other means.” (source)

I’m completely baffled on how this happened. In the Mac Messenger version, the update is handled by the standard office update. Someone on the Windows side completely dropped the ball. And I’m willing to bet that there are a _lot_ of admins out there that don’t know that this is the case.