Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Vista Service Pack already?

Well, this is a great vote of confidence in a new operating system.

It makes sense to plan for service packs. All software needs patching and the complexity of computer operating systems mean service packs and major upgrades and inevitable. But publicly planning this early for a service pack is pretty ordinary.

To run insult into injury, the next XP service pack is not scheduled for another year and even that date is preliminary. As Brian Krebs points out, we're currently looking at over a hundred patches to an XP system. It may well be 150 by early next year.

This is another example of Microsoft losing it: Both XP Service Pack three and Vista are way overdue. The fact MS has to look at an SP so early only indicates Vista is being rushed to market without all it's features or with known bugs.

What I find bizarre is the world's biggest software company has found itself in such a hole. Perhaps it's time for a change in management.