How was it for you?

Pro

1 April 2005

Relationships are difficult, complex, frustrating. Microsoft has had an ongoing affair with your PC for over two decades. Like all liaisons, there are peak, Meg Ryan-esqe moments and pits of utter despair. Neither party is immune from the consequences of the old up/down/up/down cycle.

Microsoft deployed some of its most upstanding technical assets in the trenches for the last year or more to create a free update to a product that very few users truly desired: Windows XP. Service Pack 2 has arrived, finally. What users wanted was a quality
relationship and one that they could feel secure in—not just another intense bout of flirtation followed by the same old same old.

Windows 2000 was the proverbial curate’s egg. The ungood parts were eminently capable of being fixed, or enhanced and extended in Microsoft’s parlance (as they did to the Internet). After six service packs it was steady, reliable but not unpredictably exciting—what most folks want from a marriage after the first couple of years. I still shepherd some Win2K machines and they are just fine, thank you.

But instead in 2002 our new PCs got Windows XP. XP’s appearance was not dictated by any dire and irremediable defects in its predecessor (or demands shouted from the streets). XP was occasioned solely by the product release/revenue cycle that, Bolero-like, drives Microsoft’s commercial intercourse. For a while you could still have your choice of W2K or XP but inexorably the playing field was tilted. After an indecently short interval, it was XP in your PC, like it or loathe it.

Wham bam thank you ma’am
The world is full of temptations. Just like Microsoft sees your PC as a warm and compliant place to insert their latest revenue enhancement device, there are young rakes that are just out for a bit of reckless fun and with no real sense of commitment to the community of personal and business IT users. They wantonly take advantage of your IT investment for their own vicarious thrill and treat it cruelly, infecting it with STD (software transmitted diseases) that can damage your serenity if not your economic life.

Many users delayed deploying XP until Service Pack 1 was on offer. Now, SP2 is out and has been less than the craved-for token of affection and respect. Rather than a box of chocolates it’s more like a bunch of long stem roses—thorns and all.

Was Microsoft being coy? After telling corporate users that the long awaited XP elastoplast was nigh, they played hard to get. What a tease! Those receptive users rash enough (or vexed enough by XP’s gaping security holes) found that nigh wasn’t nigh enough.

Then came the inevitable kimono-peeping exercise where Microsoft revealed that it hadn’t quite got SP2 fully dressed before it was edged out the door. We all have feet of clay and not all t’s get crossed and i’s dotted—but we aren’t releasing software to hundreds of millions of users and for millions of machines vital to the operations of corner stores and governments alike, are we?

Microsoft’s confession that more than 50 applications fall afoul of SP2’s ‘improvements’ was all the more sobering when one of the incompatibilities was one of Microsoft’s own systems management tools that is used by large businesses to deploy SP2 across their
internal networks. Ardent early adopters had to consider a quickie solution: issue stacks of CDs and pairs of roller skates to MIS staff to make the rounds of each PC. Or just wait for the service pack for the service pack.

Outfits like PC Bug Doctor are making a mint off the cack-handed SP2 deployments. As they say on their web site ‘Hidden Errors on your PC are working hard in the background to Screw (up) your computer.’ The capitalisation is theirs, the parentheses are mine.

A client recently asked me ‘SP2 now?’ My own researches and a brief consultation with Matsco Solutions, a prominent London-based IT support company, said NO. You can never say never but for SP2, right now, it is a firm negative for any mission-critical machines. When the dust clears, maybe with the release of SP2.5, that will be the time to commit.

One of the unkindest cuts of the lack of preparedness of SP2 is the complications that attach to viral defence. If viruses are insidious—corrupting data, operating systems and applications then there isn’t much difference between their effects and result of a poorly produced ‘security enhancement’. If SP2 buggers the antivirus, antispam, and/or antispyware applications that make your computer worth turning on, then why indeed install it?

And last month Microsoft warned of an additional 22 XP and Office XP security flaws—true infidelity or what? The risk points were spread from single PCs running Office applications to networked servers running mail and news applications. Included in the bounty of patches released to cover that embarrassing expanse of Redmondian backside was one to fix a graphics vulnerability introduced in SP2. The code for that bit of malware is well into the public domain so mind what jpeg files you open—and better slap on that patch!

SP2 was to be the forerunner for a system to avoid the endless patching workload. MIS professionals are justifiably wary of anything that does automatic updating from such a flaky supplier. What about the innocents, the IT virgins? Expecting inexperienced users to stay abreast with the hail of obscure and sometimes antagonistic patch requirements is just stupid.

Do you think many of the world’s users know when to ‘Update for Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 2.0 and WinHTTP 5.1 (KB842773)’? Does Microsoft think they study ‘Do It Yourself Brain Surgery’ manuals in their spare time as well? It is the great unwashed that will provide the breeding grounds for the next mega worm calamity…

Relax. Share a cigarette after your SP2 install, Microsoft seems to say. By default, SP2 enables Microsoft’s automatic updating service to suck the latest patches across the Internet and plunge them onto your open and vulnerable PC. So that’s sorted, then.

We are just short of the third anniversary of Bill Gates’ anguished internal e-mail entitled Trustworthy Computing. If it wasn’t intentionally leaked it probably seeped out of some neglected Microsoft Internet orifice. But like an unfaithful spouse, there is a reluctance to accept the apologetic stories and future promises of good behaviour based on a cold review of current performance.

What’s a spurned user to do? Pledge your troth to the iMac? Swap for Linux? Or stay in the marital bed with unfaithful Microsoft, resigned to no real improvement on a lamentable history of premature release?
 
At least with Linux there would be an army of dedicated savants working to make the code tight and paying no heed to new release addiction caused by the industry’s moth-eaten economic model. Linux users do it for love, Microsoft will do anything for money.

I have two mission-critical XP PCs and both have little icons at the bottom that say ‘Click here to install updates’. I may be able to restrain myself a while longer.

Meanwhile there is no chance that Microsoft will let up in its campaign to prepare for Longhorn—a new operating system not needed and not wanted as much as a good night’s sleep with a familiar and reliable partner humming in the office.

20/12/04

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