“If you’re considering upgrading Office with Office, we’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs,” Glotzbach advised.

“If you choose this path,” he explained, “upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed.”

Fascinating counsel, coming from a company that just a few years ago was insisting that it had no plans whatsoever to compete with Microsoft’s (MSFT) core PC software business, even as it rolled out the pieces of its own hosted desktop productivity suite.

In any event, much as Google (GOOG) claims its efforts are a match for Office, particularly Office 2010, which allows people to edit and collaborate on documents and presentations on the Web, market research says they aren’t perceived that way. And in all likelihood, Microsoft’s 94 percent share of the productivity software market (Gartner) will remain unshaken for some time to come.

To wit, a survey from Forrester Research (FORR) released on the eve of the Office 2010 launch shows quite clearly that Microsoft has little to worry about from Google Apps. Of the 115 North American and European enterprise and SMB decision makers the research house contacted, 81 percent said they use Office 2007, while four percent said they use Google’s productivity offerings. And one third said they plan to upgrade to Office 2010 in the next year.

Why?

Microsoft Office is familiar, and, in many cases, an upgrade to Office 2010 was included in their licenses (click on chart below to enlarge).

So while Google Docs might represent, as the search sovereign argues, “a real alternative for companies: a chance to get the collaboration features you need today and end the endless cycle of ‘upgrades,’” the market doesn’t yet much care. Yet. And that’s all that really matters.

Says Forrester: “The alternatives to Microsoft Office today do not meet the needs of the enterprises Forrester surveyed. Common end user barriers to adoption of alternatives include lack of required functionality, third-party integration requirements, user acceptance, lack of seamless interoperability with Office, and legacy content support needs. These gaps will be bridged in the coming years as Google, OpenOffice.org, and others mature.”

Though Windows 7 is expected at market by the end of the year, the United States military has set that as a deadline for its migration from Windows XP to the “worthy, but largely unexciting” Windows Vista and from Office 2003 to Office 2007.

The Army has been testing Vista since 2006 and its decision to move forward with a migration of its 744,000 desktops–on both classified and unclassified networks–was apparently driven by the OS’s improved security. “First, they see real value in Windows Vista’s improved security architecture,” Microsoft senior director Gavriella Schuster said in a statement. “Second, it shows large organizations have unique needs and timetables for deployment. These things take time–they have been rigorously testing internally–and it makes sense that they have approached deployment in a measured and well-planned way, especially given the number of seats they are migrating to Windows Vista.”

In the new version of Microsoft Office, I cannot find a “favorites” capability in the Open dialog box. In my older version, when I began to open a document, I had a box on the left called “Favorites” that I could invoke to find common file locations. Did they really kill this very useful feature?

No, but they changed the way you make it visible in Office 2007. You can get back your “Favorites” category by right-clicking the bar at the left-hand side of the Open dialog. From the menu that appears, click on “Add Favorites,” and your Favorites category should appear in the left-hand bar, and stay there.

If I have McAfee security software, do I need an antispyware program as well?

Everyone running a Windows computer, even a virtual Windows computer on a Mac, should have antispyware software. In some ways, spyware is a worse security problem than viruses, and can lead to identity theft.

McAfee has made many types and versions of security software over the years. Some, especially recent versions of the company’s comprehensive products, include antispyware protection. Check your version to make sure it includes this capability. If it doesn’t, you will either need to upgrade to a more comprehensive suite, or obtain a separate anti-spyware product.

When my friend put a Spike Jones CD of mine into his Mac to import it using iTunes, the CD was misidentified with an embarrassing title. What would cause such a thing to happen? Does iTunes go out to the Web looking for album names, instead of going by what’s on a disk?

Yes. Music programs like iTunes, and all its major competitors, can’t identify a disk directly. So they rely on online databases to identify CDs. Each CD contains a hidden code that the database providers quickly match up with their huge catalogs of CDs to provide the album title, artist, date, track list and other information. But, sometimes, especially when the CD is relatively obscure, the databases are wrong and yield erroneous information. When that happens, you have to type in the information by hand.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

If I buy a PC with an AMD processor instead of an Intel one, will I run into any compatibility issues with common software like Vista or Office 2007?

No, as long as the AMD processor, and/or its accompanying graphics and other chips, called a “chip set,” are rated as being able to handle the graphics in the version of Vista you are buying. Each chip company makes some low-end models that handle certain tasks more slowly than their mainstream or top-of-line models. And gamers are often particular about which chip sets they buy. But, in my experience, roughly comparable AMD and Intel processors and chip sets are equally compatible with common software like Office and Windows.

I have been using the Netscape Web browser for years. I am interested in shifting to using the Firefox browser. How do I transfer my extensive list of book marks from Netscape to Firefox?

Firefox will import your Netscape bookmarks automatically during the installation process, just as it can automatically import bookmarks from other browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

Friends who use Macs tell me they have a removable backup device that backs up their entire hard drive, including programs. Is there something similar for PCs?

You appear to be referring to Time Capsule, which is an Apple hardware product that combines a hard disk and a wireless base station and is meant to work with the Mac’s built-in Time Machine automated backup feature. The answer is that there are many backup drives for Windows PCs, and that lots of them work with Macs as well. All the major hard-disk makers sell external hard disks that connect to a PC either directly, or over a network, and which come with relatively simple backup programs. Some of these programs will do complete, automated backups of everything on your PC, including applications. Even Apple’s Time Capsule can be used to back up files from Windows PCs, though it doesn’t come with Windows backup software, and setting it up for Windows is slightly trickier than doing so on a Mac.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns online free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Microsoft (MSFT) has extended the availability of Windows XP nearly as many times as it has extended the ship dates of Windows Vista and Office 2007. The company had planned to cut off XP sales through the retail and original equipment manufacturer channels on Jan. 30, 2008, one year after Vista’s debut. But the poor reception given the new OS and “feedback” from XP advocates gave it pause to reconsider. So Microsoft adjusted the deadline to June 30.

Which makes today XP’s last on the retail market. From now on, if you want to run Windows XP on a new machine, you’ll need to purchase Windows Vista and then “downgrade” to its predecessor, which Microsoft will continue to support until 2014.

Microsoft (MSFT) has extended the availability of Windows XP nearly as many times as it has extended the ship dates of Windows Vista and Office 2007. The company had planned to cut off XP sales through the retail and original equipment manufacturer channels on Jan. 30, 2008, one year after Vista’s debut. But the poor reception given the new OS and “feedback” from XP advocates gave it pause to reconsider. So Microsoft adjusted the deadline to June 30.

Which makes today XP’s last on the retail market. From now on, if you want to run Windows XP on a new machine, you’ll need to purchase Windows Vista and then “downgrade” to its predecessor, which Microsoft will continue to support until 2014.

Late yesterday, the company announced plans to add support for the open source Open Document Format–a rival of Microsoft Word–to Office 2007. Beginning with Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, due in the first half of next year the market-leading productivity suite will offer ODF as a default file format and Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF (Portable Document Format) and Microsoft’s own XML Paper Specification as well. “We have heard from customers and governments that they would like to see us do this,” said Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft. “Now is the time to announce this support.”

“Now,” of course being short for “now that the European Commission is investigating us again over claims of monopoly abuse;” “support” short for “poor support.” At least that seems to be the position of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, which is openly skeptical of Microsoft’s sudden commitment to genuine interoperability. “It is particularly striking that all of Microsoft’s latest policy statements on interoperability are still in the future tense, as though these were difficult technical objectives,” said ECIS spokesman Thomas Vinje. “They are not. A closer look at their substance suggests that Microsoft is still playing for time to further consolidate its super-dominant position, and that continued antitrust vigilance will be necessary.”

And continued antitrust vigilance is what Microsoft’s going to get. This morning the EC said it had “taken note” of the company’s announcement and plans to study it. Said the EC, “In its ongoing antitrust investigation concerning interoperability with Microsoft Office, the commission will investigate whether the announced support of ODF in Office leads to better interoperability and allows consumers to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice.”