Are you planning to purchase Vista after Service Pack 1 is released? Your plans might have just changed. Microsoft says that they don’t have any plans to issue a major service pack for Windows Vista like they did with Windows XP. This came from a senior Microsoft official who said that Vista was “high quality right out of the gate,” and in other words, is not needed.
When asked whether they would continue to have service packs, the corporate VP for Windows Marketing says that they will, however they won’t be as urgent, or as important as XP service packs were.
If you recall, Service Pack 1 for XP was around 30–134MB, and the second one was much larger at around 75–266 MB. SP1 patched security holes, but also added additional functionality like USB 2.0 support, and a “Set Program Access and Defaults Utility”. Within that service pack, Microsoft removed Java Virtual Machine which was a requirement after a lawsuit with Sun Microsystems.
One of the big differences with Vista is how users get updates. When Microsoft can add updates slowly over time using Windows Updates, there’s really no reason for one big update like a service pack. Which also means, to those who said that they were going to wait until the first service pack was released to make the upgrade, you’ll have to think of another reason to continue using your XP machine.
Source: CyberNet Forum (Thanks Richard) [via iTnews.com]
Wow that’s crazy! I would have suspected that even with Vista’s secure platform and consistent security updates, they would still bunch them together and maybe even fix some minor problems that Vista does have… For instance the irritating problem Vista has with NOT bringing the UAC prompt to the forefront of the screen 100% of the time…
This bothers me a little… Seems they are being too confident in the quality of Vista.
I think they are probably all talk for right now…they’ll definitely be releasing a Service Pack with a bunch of updates. Whether it has any mind blowing new features is probably another thing, but it will definitely bring some improvements.
That UAC prompt not coming to the front all the time bothers me as well. I’ll go to run something just to realize that the prompt is flashing in the Taskbar waiting for me.