Windows XP Service Pack 3 Not Due Until 2007 334
vitaly.friedman writes "Microsoft has published the due date for Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) on its Windows Lifecycle Web site. The preliminary due date (the latter half of 2007) for the next collection of fixes and patches for Microsoft's desktop operating system is as more than a year later than many company watchers were expecting."
Interesting commentary on this... (Score:5, Interesting)
What does this mean for Vista? (Score:4, Interesting)
NT4 service packs ended about the time Win2K came out.
I'm guessing this means Vista will be pushed even further back then Microsoft have been letting on.
Looks like a trend... (Score:2, Interesting)
Next one after that? Won't have any service packs at all!
I'd still be using my NT4 if it weren't for the lack of USB. It was supposed to come in SP7... but didn't because 2k was released. 2k had USB support and people moved en-masse. Can't remember what XP promissed over 2k, though. Better games? Icons for children? Can't have been improved stability, right?
marketing++ (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh, well you'll be wanting Windows Vista then.
Smells like just another crappy marketing exercise to me.... good thing my next computer is going to run Mac OS / Linux (currently dual-boot Windows 2000 / Linux on my current one for games, and yes I am a transgaming subscriber ;)).
smash.
Re:"date"? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's extremely common in the software industry to target a half or quarter rather than giving a firm calendar date. I wouldn't fault Microsoft for this since everyone else does it as well. The main problem Microsoft has is this window constantly slips farther and farther back.
Just for Cringely... (Score:3, Interesting)
But the Cringely clock is still ticking...
Re:But.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Correct, Vista is planned for the end of 2006. From there, Microsoft has already planned Vista SP1 for mid-2007, followed by XP SP3 in late 2007. Basically there's 4-8 months between releases, so developers have a span of time to dedicate themselves to each project.
Re:Interesting commentary on this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well leaving aside the XPSP2 you mentioned, what about NT4SP4 (ie, integration of browser with OS)? If this is really Microsoft's statement regarding SP's, then they've went against their word more than once.
Oh come on (Score:2, Interesting)
Or maybe you think that our product cycle works like this:
1: generally define what we think should go into product
2: bust ass for multiple YEARS trying to get it all done
3: modify plan in light of things that happened in multi-year time frame
4: arbitrarily decide to NOT ship 50% of our features because they were all the way done and worked great, but, you know.. we need more stuff to ship in the future
Unfortuneately, as you're all too aware, we have a big, 20 year backlog of bugs and design problems, and we hope to chip away a little more than we add with each new feature, which we also have a multi-year long queue of new stuff we think we can add. The only feature-complete peice of software i am aware of is TeX. That means that for everything _we_ make, we think there's more left to do.
Do you beleive that there is no progress in the field of computing? Do you honestly think we pay developers and testers to sit around doing nothing for years at a time?
Every person i work with is frustrated about
- how long it takes us to ship
- how many features we have to cut
- anytime a bug affects a customer
Nobody i work with is saying "lets save that for the next version, because we cant think of enough new stuff to make a new version. All the ideas we're capable of having, we've already had, and we just need to space them out."
I can tell you i was pissed off when i heard some of the cuts for Vista. I bet the Vista team was 200x as pissed as i was - they weren't working crazy hours just so dipshits on slashdot could ask when we'd get around to "cloning OSX".
How did you get modded insightful?
Re:MS programmers are not allowed to finish? (Score:3, Interesting)
You seem to be saying what I am saying above. Microsoft programmers are not managed in such a way that they can possibly deliver a nicely finished product. Is that correct?
While Microsoft has its share of political problems and redundant layers of management (IMO), thats not actually what i meant.
When considering how to deliver Vista, we had a few options, all of which were unattractive
- keep working on it until its "done"
-- and ship multiple years later than we wanted to, by which time customers have moved in droves elsewhere, generations of new partner hardware has gone unsupported/unutilized, the entire pace of the windows software world has slowed. Legitimate customer issues we deemed to expensive to address in XP / 2k3 take that much longer to get into customer hands.
- cut a bunch of stuff completely to make it by date blah
-- despite the # of bugs that we ship with, we are very bug averse and risk averse. if we dont think something will be done enough and meet the quality bar, we dont let it in the box.
-- nobody is thrilled about doing date driven releases but everyone understands why sometimes its better to get a working product with a subset of features into the hands of customers sooner
I would characterize our situation, in general, for everything we do, as:
"we have a variety of choices, each of which will piss off somebody"
We're in the business of minimizing the valence of "sombody"