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Last-Minute Glitch Holds Up Windows XP SP3
An anonymous reader sends word that Microsoft Windows XP SP3, which had been scheduled to hit the Web today, was pulled back at the last minute. SP3 apparently broke a Microsoft application, Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System. Their solution is to set up a filter to make sure that no system running the affected software will get automatically updated; once the filter is in place, SP3 will be released to the Web. A fix for the incompatibility will follow.
So why do I keep getting the feeling like they will provide some "incentives" to migrate to Vista with this new SP3 release... I mean why release a service pack 2 months before you end support on a product?? Kind of something to think about before installing this potential trojan... :)
Maybe if they programmed things properly in the first place, and didn't spend ages designing hidden APIs and other stuff that only they themselves could take advantage of, they wouldn't be in this colossal mess. And I think it speaks volumes that such a company is unable to handle its own products.
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Insert plug for Free Software plug here --
Why? Because this is Microsoft.
Yeah, okay, retract your "ZEALOT!" claws for a second here and let's just look at their track record over the last four years:
- XP SP2 - for over a year after its release Microsoft had a free support line set up SPECIFICALLY to roll people back to SP1 because the upgrade broke just about everything. Most official support from Microsoft Products (Office, MSN, etc.) involved the following: Are you on SP2? If yes, go to SP2 support to roll back. If no, continue with troubleshooting.
- Vista - Backwards compatibility for applications and drivers broken, UAC interfering in various tasks and regardless of constantly selecting "Allow" you'd still get permission problems, slow performance, original system specs apparently not good enough to run all features.
- Vista SP1 - broke the OS, more compatibility problems, slight performance upgrade but still will not run on lightly powered computers
Conclusions? Best one I can come up with is that Microsoft has no concept how to properly test their products. I'd honestly believe that their concept of alpha testing is "Does it compile?" and I think a lot of their testers are outsourced (this is a guess) offshore because it's cheaper, and this usually results in degraded quality as well as introducing barriers between the developers and those reporting the errors.
It works like this: If you have in-house testers, you may have one person in between testers and developers at most. It's a lot easier for a tester to speak directly to the developer and answer any questions that the developer might have. When dealing with outsourcing, usually the testers need to report the issues to somebody in-house (supervisor? senior?), who a lot of the time will then need to pass it on to their liason to the client. The liason will then speak to a liason from Microsoft who will then address it to the supervising programmer (or worse yet, the programming supervisor who then passes it to the supervising programmer), and finally it makes its way to the developers.
Then a developer looks at the broken English in the error report as well as all the spin and syllables added by the various managers, and has to go through the chain again to find out wtf the original tester is talking about.
Remember the game "Telephone?" Where everybody sits in a giant line, person on one end whispers something to the person next to them, who does likewise to the person on the other side, and so on and so forth until it gets to the end and the message sounds nothing like what it was originally. It's a lot like that.
This is a real problem in the tech world these days. Globalisation is making it so that left hands never know what right hands are doing because there's way too many layers of flappers between the people with the information and the people who need it. Information gets delayed, lost and misdirected much like airline luggage.
Karma: Non-Heinous
This is hilarious, they are writing a patch for a patch that has not been released yet!!!!