Windows Vista hasn't fared so well since its debut. Its generally low reputation among customers has led one Forrester analyst to dub Microsoft's latest OS "the New Coke of tech," while some studies have suggested that nearly a third of customers who buy a PC with Vista pre-installed may actually be downgrading those machines to XP.

Still other customers seem to wish the whole thing will just go away. They don't want to hear about Vista at all -- they'd rather hear about Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that will be Vista's successor. And given the dismal consumer reaction to its latest attempts to market Vista, Microsoft seems willing to oblige. The sketchy early reports of Windows 7 have lately grown into a steady trickle of hints and rumors. The catch is, not all of it sounds particularly encouraging.

It looks as if Microsoft's OOXML office document file format will be published as an open standard after all. The International Standards Organization (ISO) today rejected four appeals from subsidiary national standards bodies that claimed ballot irregularities during the standardization process. Had these appeals been upheld, an OOXML standard could have been delayed indefinitely, despite Microsoft's best efforts to fast-track the process.

Barring any further hold-ups, ISO is expected to publish the full text of the standard within the next few weeks. But as the dust clears, many IT managers and office software users will likely be left scratching their heads: What does an open standard office file format from Microsoft actually get us?

Users are rightfully annoyed when services like Gmail experience unexpected outages. We've come to expect that our e-mail should be available whenever we need it -- even when the service is provided for free. Imagine your frustration, then, if you found out that software you had bought and paid for had suddenly stopped functioning on a certain date.

This is exactly the problem faced by customers of VMware ESX, VMware's enterprise-class virtualization engine. As of today, due to a bug in VMware's license management software, no new virtual machine instances will launch for customers running VMware ESX 3.5 U2. And so far, there's no fix.

For most small to midsized businesses, software means Microsoft. For almost any category of business software -- from word processing to spreadsheets, presentations to communication and collaboration -- Microsoft is the de facto vendor of choice. Alternatives do exist, but who wants to be the first one to rock the boat? Microsoft has grown so cocky about its position that it even bragged that it would soon steal five million users away from IBM's Lotus Notus, a competitor to its own Outlook and Exchange.

That's not the kind of threat that IBM takes lying down. On the contrary; it's digging in. Big Blue claims that it is redoubling its efforts to win customers away from Microsoft, beginning with a big win in Asia and new partnerships with major Linux vendors.

Just as it's a good idea to store important documents in a safe deposit box to protect against fire, storing a copy of your data offsite is a smart move for any business. But for many individuals and small businesses, regular backups are enough of a chore, let alone regularly moving those backed-up files to offsite storage. It's easy to fall out of the habit.

A new startup called Cucku thinks the answer is something it calls "social backup software." Cucku Backup makes regular backups of your important files to a local hard disk and then automatically sends a copy of the latest changes to an offsite "backup partner" -- whether it's a dedicated server or just a friend with a PC. You don't need any special hardware to make it happen. So how does it work? I'll give you a hint: Your backup partner can't be more than a phone call away (but Cucku doesn't use a modem).