4sysops - No Vista SP1 beta in the near future - Why are all these speculations about service packs necessary?

Last week I blogged that Vista SP1 beta might be available this week. This information was based on a post of Mary Jo Foley. It seems that her contacts to Microsoft are not as good as I thought. Joe Willcox from Microsoft Watch seems to have other information.

Marry Jo Foley meanwhile published an official statement about this issue from Microsoft:

There will be a Windows Vista service pack and our current expectation is that a beta will be made available sometime this year…

Our current expectation? This information is not really helpful! All this speculation about service packs is a bit annoying. Why doesn’t Microsoft just publish a time table? Is it really so difficult to plan a service pack release? It is unnecessary, as I see it, to offer new features with this service pack. All we need is a new base where all the patches of the last months are included. I already said it before Windows Update can’t replace a service pack.

It is the same game with Windows XP SP3. Every month or so, all the Microsoft watchers out there start speculating when it might become available. Microsoft should put an end to all this speculation and just give us the release dates. This is really childish. How can you plan major deployments if you have to rely on mere speculations?

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Comment by Adam — July 23, 2007 @ 9:16 pm

Well, with Vista, the Service Pack watch is a big deal due to the fact that many shops won’t deploy a new OS until SP1 comes out. Many shops feel that this is when the OS is actually ready for “prime time”.

While I don’t agree with that in this case, I think Vista is a pretty good OS over all. SP1 is supposed to fix a few bugs that I have found, specifically with Powershell and WMI retrieval. So I do find some interest in when it will be available.

As for XP SP3, I don’t think anyone is waiting to deploy XP until then so it probably isn’t as big of an issue.

Comment by Michael — July 24, 2007 @ 8:55 pm

I agree that Vista is much more reliable than many have expected. However, it is important anyway to know when SP1 is available. The point is that software (from Microsoft and third-party vendors) often can be installed only if you have the latest service pack on your machines. Thus, it can be quite annoying if it comes out shortly after a major rollout. The same applies to Windows XP SP3.