While drinking coffee and reading the newspapers this morning, the telephone rings (who calls before 9 a.m. on the weekend anyway?) and it's one of those automated customer service messages reminding me that I haven't paid by Rogers bill yet. The weird thing is the computerized voice had an Australian accent!

So how keen are you about Microsoft Vista? Keen enough to be among the first people to embrace the new, much-anticipated and much-delayed operating system? During this week's Talking Tech podcast, Kevin Restivo and I both advise smart computers users to wait on Vista until Microsoft fixes any of the inevitable bugs that will emerge despite years of development and billions of dollars of R&D. After all, we're talking about an operating system with 40 million lines of code.

That said, when I think of Vista, I think of those old Fram oil filter commercial in which a mechanic tells a customer, "you can pay me now or you can pay me later". For computer users, it means you can migrate to Vista now (not recommended) or do it later but at some point, you'll probably have to do it to take advantage of new software and Web services designed specifically for Vista. While everyone is focused on Vista, people and investors shouldn't overlook the launch of Office 2007 given Office accounts for 30% of Microsoft's sales and 50% of profits.

Earlier this week, the Toronto Sun laid off 16 more employees - reflecting the newspaper industry's continued struggles. The question is if you owned a newspaper, what would you do to fix it? USAToday's Kevin Maney had an interesting column exploring the idea earlier this week, while I was inspired to write a blog post with my take.

Finally, Kevin (Restivo) and I looked at BitTorrent's $20-million venture capital deal. We're not sure how BitTorrent is going to spend $20-million given it doesn't have a P2P network to operate. Perhaps it's a sign investors believe the music and movie industries will start to capitalize on P2P rather than fight it like the music industry has insisted on doing. It could also suggests BitTorrent's investors believe consumers may be willing to pay for an online service that provide high-quality downloads at reasonable prices (much like iTunes). Then again, the problem with the P2P world is even if you have a legitimate player emerge, there will always be new ones offering free content...such as DailyMotion.com, which has a library of commercial-free TV shows.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Newspapers, P2P, Video