Ridiculous!! Let's recap: the only new software idea by anybody in a long, long time is nearly useless on 64bit systems. Hmmm, MS better get its crap together before Mac releases a tablet.

This is absolutely disgusting!

Really, I think Microsoft must be trying to get its users to go try other manufacturers' software.

Their lack of x64 support is very disturbing. I can't believe anyone would consider it at this point.

After an initially angry reaction at Microsoft's disregard for its customers, I think there is a more serious issue here than just OneNote 2007 on Vista-64.

Microsoft was BillG's dream, and he was the guiding force in establishing its dominance. The people who worked with him carried out that dream, and they did it rather well. With Bill now beginning to transition to a new career, though, that competence has MS running in many different directions, often in inconsistent manners.

To someone who uses a lot of Microsoft software, this example of the Office product team not working to make its product work well on the OS team's latest and best (and the fact that Warner's HP tablet is on Vista 64 certainly is not an accident) is an indication of likely future problems unless the senior management at MS gets its act together and brings the company's various divisions into working together.

Hi,
My name is David Rasmussen. I am the Group Program Manager for OneNote. Before you all decide we should be burnt at the stake, let me explain a little. We fully understand how important the print to OneNote feature is, and we apologize for this transition period.

For the print to OneNote feature in OneNote 2003 and 2007, we are dependent on a piece of technology called MODI, or Microsoft Office Document Imaging component. It's a very, very large amount of code, and quite an old piece of code that is difficult to support.

Drivers must be fully ported from 32 bit to 64 bit to work on 64 bit OSes. 32 bit Application code works on 64 bit OSes on top of an emulation layer (called WOW64 or Windows on Windows 64), so getting the application code to work is not too hard. Drivers are a whole different story though because they hook into the OS at a lower level and can't run on WOW64 emulation. Also, older drivers tend to contain a lot of low level code and often assembly code that is not easy to port.

Given the size of the code, and the issues above, porting the MODI print driver for OneNote 2007 would be a LOT of work. Work that we would have to trade off directly against other improvements, and features that many users such as yourselves have been asking us for. That makes it a difficult decision. One we thought about a lot.

The solution we have is we think a better one for OneNote users in the long run. We will be moving the print driver component to a new technology in our next release of OneNote. One that has several benefits including the quality of the users experience, the quality of the printout rendering and some others I can't detail right now. This new technology also supports 64 bit natively, so we kill two birds with one stone. We're quite confident that is the right decision, but unfortunately because of the nature of this technology, we couldn't back port it to make it work in OneNote 2007. That left us in a difficult position. We could either do lots of work to port MODI AND transition to this better, easier to maintain technology for the future, but that would have been at the cost of perhaps most of the features and improvements you've all been asking for.

Ultimately, given the current market data on take up rate of 64 bit client OSes, we concluded we were better off aiming for the best experience for the next release of OneNote when 64 bit OS penetration will start to be significant. The benefits of running 64 bit OSes at the moment are pretty slim. There are very few desktop applications yet that need or can take advantage of the address space (servers sure can though...). So you won't really notice a performance improvement with a 64 bit OS on your desktop, but that will change over time, and we want to be ready for it with the best possible solution.

Unfortunately, great software development is full of such difficult trade offs. We're not idiots (we hope). And we're not malicious (we love our product and want our users to love it too). We just have finite resources, and are trying to make the best trade off decisions to deliver the best possible product.

Thanks,
David Rasmussen