It’s been a more eventful week in IT land than I expected. First, Microsoft announced yesterday that the next versions of Office for Windows and Mac OS X will use ZIP-compressed XML file formats as the default. Woohoo! No more brittle binary files. And they’re being smart enough to change the extensions so you can easily distinguish “legacy” Office documents from the new XML-based ones.
But then CNET News.com dropped a real bombshell when it reported earlier today that Apple will announce on Monday that it is switching its Macs to Intel. I’ll believe it when I hear it from Steve Jobs’ mouth. But if it’s true, that means that Apple switches to Intel at the same time Microsoft moves Xbox to IBM PowerPC. What???