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Microsoft Taking Longer to Fix Flaws
An anonymous reader writes "A look back at the last three years of security patches from Microsoft shows Redmond is taking at least 25 percent longer to issue patches for "critical" vulnerabilities, now averaging around 135 days to issue a fix. The exception appears to be with "full disclosure" flaws, for which Redmond issued fixes in an average of 46 days last year."
In the Linux world, the deployment of a bug fix and discovery of any potential bugs is part of the testing cycle. So you get a quick turn around time when a bug is reported.
.. whatever it takes to make sure it is tested is a GOOD thing. I don't want to be their beta tester :)
When Microsoft has to issue a bug fix (and all jokes aside about not testing), I am sure they have a team devoted to testing it, then it has to get sent to all internal Microsoft employees and tested, and then probably even has some initial customer testing with the bigger companies to make sure nothing breaks, and then finally gets released to the public.
Hopefully 165 or 365 days
Focusing on the exploits or not, 46 days is a long time to wait for a critical fix.
when you're accountable to that many customers with so many "supported" configurations, it takes a while to test. They don't have the luxury of most linux distro's where if it breaks some obscure program they can go "whupps, well, tell the author to write a fix for his app".