MS Patches Go For Quality Over Quantity? 225
greengrass writes "eWeek.com is running a story about another Microsoft 'study'. This one discusses how good Microsoft is at providing patches for their OS. This is Part 2 of 3 in a series of articles, the first of which compared Linux and Windows on legacy systems." From the article: "Bill Hilf, who is director of Platform Technology Strategy at Microsoft and heads its Linux and open-source lab, told eWEEK in a recent interview that 'the differentiator for customers is not the number comparison, but which vendor makes the patching and updating experience the least complex, most efficient and easiest to manage.'"
More M$ Hooey (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft Corp. seems to be moving away from focusing on the actual number of security patches and updates that it and its software competitors release.
But of course they are...since Joe Brockmeier and Joe Barr of NewsForge [newsforge.com], as well as Pamela Jones of Groklaw [groklaw.net] did such a masterful job of debunking the ridiculous annual summary of vulnerabilities by US-CERT [us-cert.gov] (discussed earlier on Slashdot [slashdot.org]), Microsoft has necessarily had to switch propaganda tactics.
Instead, it is concentrating on making it easy and efficient for customers to obtain the security fixes and update their systems.
That's funny...I've never had a problem with my Yast Online Update...
"...patching, particularly for security, is not a 'Microsoft problem,' but something that affects all operating system and platform vendors," Hilf said.
Nice straw man, Hilf. No one is claiming that non-Microsoft operating systems don't need to be patched. The issue is whether the patches are issued in a timely manner...or not [microsoft.com].
It may be good.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about, which vendor makes the patches unnecessary (i.e., few and far between) because it released a solid, working program?
I don't want patch quality. I want program quality.
I work in proprietary software. Most places that do proprietary software are overworked and quality suffers. (EA is an extreme example where workplace quality suffered as well as program quality.)
In the places I've worked, everyone's too busy doing what they've been assigned and they're overworked because they're understaffed. Hiring more people means less money for the company so that generally doesn't happen.
With FOSS, anyone can pick up the source if they have some spare time and hack away at it, and even if individual contributions are small, there's always someone with some spare time and a different view about how something should work.
Once you start doing for money's sake, you spend more time worrying about your bottom line than about quality.
I was looking for... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah because (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, because typing "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" once in a while is so damn hard to manage.
Re:Focus Magazine Interview Haunts Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
Those rumours have preceded every version of MS-Windows since NT 3.51 (the most secure and stable version of MS-Windows to date, in my experience). I've stopped waiting for MS to produce an exceptional operating system. There are much, much better alternatives out there -- OS X, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. What's the point of waiting for MS to play catch-up?
I'm interested in seeing Vista in action. I'll probably take a look when someone at work here picks it up. I don't hold out a lot of hope that it will beat the stability of Solaris, the ease-of-use and consistency of OS X, or the openness and general all-over chocolatey goodness of Linux and *BSD.
Let's see if they still group programs by vendor, and not by function.
least complex? (Score:3, Insightful)
Full credit to eWeek... (Score:4, Insightful)
One great example was this:
Interestingly, Microsoft's Hilf has a personal Red Hat workstation in his office that he uses on a daily basis. He selected a random week in October to provide a snapshot of the updates made to his Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation over that period. He found that, between Oct. 6, 2005, and Oct. 11, 2005, his workstation was updated 66 times.
"I chose those dates randomly," he said. "I use this system daily, so it was literally a snapshot of a given workweek. All this illustrates is that patching and updating are part of any 'living' software system. It is part of the nature of modern software: Things change, bugs happen, features get added, and software needs to get updated."
But Red Hat's Cox pointed out that the second update release for RHEL4 was issued Oct. 5, resulting in a very large number of updated packages over the period of a day or two, "which is what Hilf saw. We only issued two Update releases for RHEL4 in 2005, so he was quite unlucky in his choice of a random snapshot," he said, tongue in cheek.
Unlucky indeed. Nice to see some unbiased reporting and not just verbatim duplication of Microsoft comments and 'press releases' for a change.
Re:More M$ Hooey (Score:4, Insightful)
What about Cox's boasting that Red Hat took the initiative to notify its users about the Flash issue?
This quote sums it up nicely:
From TFA (emphasis mine): How far does it go?
Basically, if you are the one to provide the software, you are responsible for getting the patches to the users. This is one big reason the *nixes performance in US-CERT's annual summary of vulnerabilities appeared so poor...because the *nixes were also issuing patches for all the software that came bundled with the OS.
Re:Focus Magazine Interview Haunts Gates (Score:3, Insightful)
Because like any operating system you will eventually want to add something to the machine like a newer video card.... Or a new codex and then what happens when you turn off the machine? But even three seconds of thought would have told you that.
Eventually you (gasp) might even want to try a new distro....
For crying out loud talk about vendor lock...
Argh, more buzzwords (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More M$ Hooey (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
Public companies don't have this luxury; they have to care about 'the bottom line', because they are responsible to their shareholders before they are responsible to their customers. In a private company, the customer comes first and foremost, and the difference in quality is measurable.
Look at BMW and Mercedes --- BMW is privately owned, and whether or not their styling appeals to you, it would be hard to argue that they aren't top-notch in terms of quality, funtionality, and service. Mercedes, on the other hand, canned the complimentary service option a few years ago[1], and offers far less 'bang-for-the-buck' in the luxury car market.
[1] It used to be that purchasing a luxury automobile meant that the manufacturer would stand behind your purchase in every conceivable way, and complimentary maintainence was a part of this package. Mercedes used to be very good at this, and had one of the best service packages in the industry. Now, you get to pay for your own service to go along with your top-of-the-market-priced car, and the build quilty has been nickel-and-dimed below that of a Nissan. Sad to see such a nice car company go down the tubes.
Re:Focus Magazine Interview Haunts Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to play devil's advocate, Apple's OS is largely bug-free and secure, and yet quite a few people pay cash money for an upgrade every year or so. This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates.
Would Apple sell enough upgrades to make a profit if they weren't making money from hardware (and iPod) sales? Maybe not, but it's worth asking.
Re:Correction. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Focus Magazine Interview Haunts Gates (Score:1, Insightful)
If Vista can provide a good stability (which it should, XP is very stable), good ease-of-use, and "chocolately goodness", then it would be the best operating system for general consumption.
yes, let us believe the head of the MS Anti-Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anybody think there is any truth to what the head of Microsofts anti-Linux group says?
Do you think he might have a little motivation to make sure people THINK their OS smells like roses?
I do.
IMO
But thankyou Mr Hilfe for making sure CIO's, CTO, etc know that Linux is on Microsofts mind. THAT,
combined with what their employees are experiencing is great for your competition.
LoB
Microsoft propaganda machine in attack mode? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, that makes me wonder: is this just the season for the Microsoft propaganda machine to become active? Or is Linux striking more fear than usual into their hearts?