Microsoft Says No TCP/IP Patches For XP

CWmike writes "Microsoft says it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. 'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,' said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast, referring to Windows 2000 and XP. 'An update for Windows XP will not be made available,' Stone and fellow program manager Jerry Bryant said during the Q&A portion of the Webcast (transcript here). Last Tuesday, Microsoft said that it wouldn't be patching Windows 2000 because creating a fix was 'infeasible.'"

Comments

Good Bye Microsoft

[curmudgeon99]

This is just another reason to abandon Microsoft. I am so happy with my Mac, open office and a variety of other non-Microsoft technologies. The last time I spent money on one of their "products" was Windows 98. No reason to ever drop a dime again on their crap.

Re:Good Bye Microsoft

[BOFslime]

This is just another reason to abandon Microsoft. I am so happy with my Mac, open office and a variety of other non-Microsoft technologies. The last time I spent money on one of their "products" was Windows 98. No reason to ever drop a dime again on their crap.

I'm sure your reasoning is sound, nobody should buy software from a company that drops support for its previous generat, oh.. oh wait.

Re:Yeah, right

[somersault]

I don't particularly like Microsoft, in fact they are still my least favourite company in the world. But do you expect Adobe to keep bringing out patches for 8 year old versions of Photoshop? Would you expect a car manufacturer to offer a 10 year warranty on all of their cars? Anyone who is heavily reliant on old versions of Windows probably only has themselves to blame. If they are relying on popular 3rd party software then chances are that it has a newer version out for Windows. If they are using in house software that can only run on XP then they should have it updated.

Microsoft are perfectly within their rights to "force" obsolescence onto users by concentrating on more recent versions of their software. They would also be perfectly within their rights to stop making Windows altogether and start manufacturing refrigerators. Yes, they use very scummy business and marketing tactics, but as far as stopping support for XP, it is one of the more reasonable of their scummy tactics. They even produced a backwards compatibility plugin to let Office 2003 work with 2007, I was quite shocked at that.