Vladimir, Estragon Retire as Official Spokesmen for Windows Vista Service Pack 1
by John Paczkowski
Posted on August 30, 2007 at 12:01 AM PT
Microsoft confirmed yesterday what anyone with a Web browser and a BitTorrent client has long presumed: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) really does exist, as does a schedule for testing and availability. After dancing around the subject for months, Microsoft finally came clean yesterday and said it will release Windows Vista SP1 in the first quarter of 2008. But don’t expect any grand changes to the operating system when it does. SP1 won’t deliver any major new features, just improvements to reliability, security and performance.
“SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues we’ve identified via customer feedback, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards,” said Microsoft product manager Nick White. “SP1 also makes additional improvements to the IT administration experience. We didn’t design SP1 as a vehicle for releasing new features.”
Of course not. How could you reasonably devote resources to new feature development when, as David Zipkin, senior product manager in Microsoft’s Windows Client group, eupehmistically explained: “People are having some variety in their experiences with Windows Vista.”
Yeah, the sort of “variety” that inspires some Microsoft Gold partners to rip it off the systems they’ve installed it on 99% of the time …
Anyway, the release of SP1 will likely inspire the corporate customers who’ve put off upgrading to Vista until Microsoft works out its kinks to finally invest in the OS. As IDC analyst Al Gillen told the Seattle Post Intelligencer: “It’s a watershed event for a lot of customers. … Mentally, it’s still an important milestone, I believe. For a lot of customers, they still wait to see a service pack because they feel that is the point in time where a Microsoft product has gotten to a level of testing or reliability where they have the confidence that the product is going to be stable enough for them to use.”
