Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
It's kind of strange though, even prior to the end of mainstream support for W2K, and with SP5 apparently completed and about to be put on tap, MS canned it, and instead offered a collection of security patches only instead, in the form of one of their infamous "rollups". What about the bugfix patches that were part of SP5??? Those are actually more important to some of us, especially those that have their own firewall installed, and don't use IE or OE, and thus have no real need for 95% of the security patches that MS releases. But things like kernel-memory resource leaks in the USB stack, or faulty locking primitives in the SCSI port driver leading to race conditions - now those are the kinds of bugfixes that I need. It seems that in the case of W2K, MS decided to "close up shop and go home early", earlier than their previously-posted "store hours", if you know what I mean. The truth is, MS doesn't really care about their customers, any more than is required to keep them on the constant upgrade treadmill. If they did, there would have been an IE 6 SP2 update for W2K, there would have been a standlone IE7 with tabbed browsing update and working full PNG image support *years* ago, and most certainly, they wouldn't have dropped the W2K SP5 release, just like they did the NT4 SP7 release, years ago, in a bid to attempt to force customers to upgrade instead.
I'm not talking about indefinately - rather, that MS has failed to fully support it, during their previously announced and defined support periods. If one considers that a purchase of a valid legal license to own/install a copy of that OS, also includes the documented mainstream support lifetime period, then by MS cutting that short by cancelling the release of SP5, MS is stealing from their customers, the support that the customers have already arguably paid for.Originally posted by: MrChad
What other software company supports and updates older releases indefinitely? Five years is not an unreasonably short support cycle for a piece of software.
I call BS on that one. MS has already promised (in fact, forced to promise, at the behest of their corporate customers), that service packs will not introduce any major new features, and MS stuck to that in W2K SP2, SP3, and SP4. (SP1 did indeed introduce a few new features, which is why the complaints arose originally.)Originally posted by: STaSh
New features will not be added during extended support, and design change requests will not be accepted. Which is why none of the things Larry is complaining about will be implemented.
This is sort of funny, coming (indirectly) from a company with: 1) more cash in the bank than any other company in the industry, and 2) that only just recently started to pay dividends to their shareholders, unlike the vast majority of less-greedy publically-owned corporations that regularly pay dividends to their shareholders.Originally posted by: STaSh
Microsoft is a company with finite resources, like anyone else. They are also a publically traded company, so they have a responsibility to do what their share holders want. And it does not make much business sense to expend resources on products indefinitely.
I call BS on that one. MS has already promised (in fact, forced to promise, at the behest of their corporate customers), that service packs will not introduce any major new features, and MS stuck to that in W2K SP2, SP3, and SP4. (SP1 did indeed introduce a few new features, which is why the complaints arose originally.)
So if a SP5 exists to fix bugs, and not to add new features, nor any significant design changes, why did MS pull it? (Well, we both do already know the answer to that - to attempt to force corps that were sitting on the fence with W2K to move to XP/2003.)
Fine. But as a paying customer, that doesn't support my needs. Thus tending to make me a non-customer. As a shareholder, perhaps you might/should also be concerned about that factor.Originally posted by: STaSh
Having a lot of cash does not change the fact that you have finite resources. Should Microsoft spend a chunk of that money to hire thousands of developers and support personnel to support a five year old product? Or should they use the resources they have to work on current and future products? As a shareholder, I would want them to do the latter.