Archive for May, 2010

BT has confirmed plans to extend its fibre broadband rollout, after reporting better than expected profits.

The company announced profits of just over £1 billion for the year ending 31 March. That’s a marked improvement on last year, when BT posted a net loss of £244 million.

BT has announced it will plough pretty much all of that profit into fibre broadband. The company has confirmed plans leaked earlier this week that it will now reach two thirds of the country with its fibre rollout by 2015. Until now, BT had only committed to hitting 40% of homes by 2012.

"Assuming an acceptable environment for investment, we see the potential to roll out fibre to around two-thirds of the UK by 2015," said BT CEO Ian Livingston. "This will take our total fibre investment to £2.5bn which will be managed within our current levels of capital expenditure."

When asked to confirm what an "acceptable environment for investment" meant, a BT spokesman insisted the company wasn’t trying to wriggle fresh concessions out of telecoms regulator Ofcom. BT last year won the freedom to set its own wholesale fibre prices as a condition of its initial rollout.

Instead, BT claims the caveat is designed to reassure investors that BT would review the investment if regulatory or market conditions changed.

BT reportedly decided to pump more money into fibre after having received encouragement that rival ISPs such as Sky and TalkTalk will lease wholesale high-speed connections from the company. The BT spokesman wouldn’t confirm any new deals, but said that "the more people using our network the better, as it helps us get a return on it".

Microsoft has hit back at Google’s claim that Docs makes Office better, calling the statement "simply not true".

Earlier in the week, Google Enterprise president Dave Girouard urged businesses to skip the Office 2010 upgrade, and consider running Docs alongside their existing Office suite.

"Most people find, and they maybe perhaps don’t expect it at first, that Google Docs works quite well with Office and in fact it makes Office better," he said.

It (Google) is claiming that an organisation can use both seamlessly. This just isn’t the case

The argument has clearly rankled in Redmond, and in a lengthy response on the TechNet blog, Microsoft’s director of online product management, Alex Payne, argued that businesses which believed the argument would swiftly learn a "painful" lesson.

"It [Google] is claiming that an organisation can use both seamlessly. This just isn’t the case," he said. "Charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes, SmartArt etc. might be gone or manipulated in a way resulting in something that doesn’t look like it did before conversion [from Office to Docs]," Payne said.

"When that file was originally converted from Office to Google Docs, you lost those components," he said. "They aren’t coming back just because you are in Office again."

Document fidelity

In contrast, Payne argued that Microsoft had worked to ensure that users converting documents between its mobile, desktop and online suites wouldn’t have to worry about losing features.

"If you have a document that was created in Office and you upload it to our Office Web Apps, the document will look almost identical when you view it in the browser and we maintain the components in the doc even if you don’t see them in the web," he said.

"This means that a document that shows up back in the rich client Office (after starting there, going to the web and back) will look just like it did when you started (with full functionality). We call this ’round-tripping’ and we think it’s important. Google Docs simply doesn’t do this when you use it with Office," he concluded.

Office 2010 is currently being rolled out to businesses, and will hit retail on 15 June.

Microsoft has revealed that Office 2010 will be available to consumers on 15 June.

The suite brings a raft of improvements over Office 2007 including a customisable Ribbon interface, a Backstage view offering detailed information on the file you’re working on, and an ability to access unsaved documents you may have closed by mistake.

Features

The complete guide to Office 2010

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new suite are the Web Apps – free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote designed to combat the threat of Google Docs.

Web Apps retain much of the desktop software’s functionality – including live document search, and the ability to manipulate and edit pictures, graphs and formulae – and Microsoft’s hoping this familiarity will help lure users away from Google’s rival offering.

The announcement comes as Microsoft begins to roll out Office 2010 to businesses.