IT professionals furious over SP1 delay

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 12 Feb 2008 at 10:58

Microsoft's decision to hold back Vista SP1 from IT professionals has caused a deluge of complaints on the TechNet blog, which Microsoft has swiftly silenced.

Although PC manufacturers have been given access to copies of the software, IT professionals will have to wait until March when the update will also be released to home users.

This has angered many IT professionals, who will have no time to test the update before users are given access to it.

"If you're doing this to keep it from getting out to home users, you do realise that one of the OEMs will leak it in a matter of days, right?" one user claimed on the TechNet blog.

Microsoft employees made several attempts to placate the complaining crowd, with little success. "I'm checking into if we can pull the availability in sooner for TechNet Plus subscribers," wrote one site moderator.

"As you can tell just from the mood here, if TechNet Plus/MSDN folks don't get access to SP1 soon, this is going to turn into a PR nightmare for Microsoft. Hopefully the suits figure that out," warned the user Pete Mitchell.

Eventually, Microsoft employees stopped replying to comments, and simply closed off the post to new comments.

Microsoft released a beta version of Vista SP1 to 12,000 users in September last year, and the latest release candidate emerged just a fortnight ago. The update will now be launched to home users in March.