Direct2Dell

Here are some items of interest from last week:

• Dell started shipping Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) to customers in the English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. We'll ship it in more  languages as it becomes available. We knew SP1 has different ramifications for different customers, and that's why Geoff Knox wrote two different posts—one for home users and a second for small business users. On the corporate side, while  we didn't have a post, I think it's worth mentioning that over the last couple of weeks, Microsoft's recent hints about Windows 7 may be a good reason for more corporate customers to upgrade to Vista. If you're interested in reading a bit more about this, take a look at my last week in review and Michael's comments about Windows 7 from earlier in the week.
• Jesse Leonard who's one of our OS and open source gurus, published a blog post about the Mozilla Foundation's upcoming browser, Firefox 3  I've been playing around with FF3 for a while now, and I tend to agree with Walt Mossberg's  recent assessment: Firefox 3 features put it in front of Internet Explorer 7 and Apple's Safari 3.1. If you want to make that decision for yourself, click here to download the latest Firefox 3 release candidate.
• Dell hosted a group of reporters representing China, India, Australia, Korea and Japan. These reporters met with several Dell executives while they were here. Anne B. Camden posted a recap of Alex Gruzen's session, and I posted my take on Michael's meeting on Direct2Dell.

It's also worth mentioning that late last week, we upgraded to Community Server 2008—the latest version of our blogging platform software. Right now, we're still working through some glitches. This upgrade will, however, lead to some improvements over time... some of which Direct2Dell readers have wanted for quite some time. Soon, I'll explain more.

Oh, and one more thing.. like Biz and the folks at Twitter, a few of us here will be watching to see what comes out of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.