When asked what product in the past year the Redmond company should have perfected before releasing it to consumers, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, present at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, pointed to Windows Vista without hesitation. Or more like it, Gates suggested that Vista could have done with a little extra time in the oven, despite the extensive cooking time of the operating system. With Vista, Microsoft proved yet again that the operating system is the core of a Windows-centric environment of hardware and software products. Any change in Windows will reverberate across the entire ecosystem, and with Vista, at least for the first year, Microsoft's evangelism efforts were not on target.

"The key learning over the last year is that when we change the operating system, it takes time to let the ecosystem make sure that the hardware and software that they build works well with Windows Vista. So as we release Windows Vista SP1 to manufacturing, we are going to be thoughtful about when and how it gets distributed," revealed Mike Nash, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management.

Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008. The RTM date is by no means synonymous with the general availability of the service pack, which was postponed for more than a month. Vista SP1 won't start being delivered to end users until mid-March. Ahead of that date, the Redmond company is gearing up to ship Vista SP1 to its original equipment manufacturing (OEM) partners, in order to be preloaded on new computers, and will also kick off the manufacturing process for the retail product of Vista plus SP1. Along with the OEM and retail channels, the company's Volume Licensing partners will also be getting their hands in advance on Vista SP1 DVDs.

"As we update our customers to SP1, we want everyone to have a great install experience. We are going to stage our rollout of SP1 for current Windows Vista users to be approximately concurrent with the availability of Windows Vista SP1 on new PCs and in stores. There are a couple of reasons for this," Nash stated.

The fact of the matter is that missing or low quality drivers have been one of the main generators of criticism for Microsoft. But should the company be held responsible for the lack of support from hardware manufacturers? Well, yes. Microsoft is at least in part guilty. The company's evangelism division should have ensured that it wouldn't take an entire year for the hardware and software ecosystem to become tailored on Vista. And as far as Vista SP1 is concerned, the sins of Vista are still there, at least in terms of drivers...

"Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers. These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices. Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers. While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available," Nash added.

Microsoft will drop Vista SP1 in mid-March for all Vista users via the Download Center and through Windows Update and Microsoft Update. Nash informed that Windows Update would not offer Vista SP1 to users whose systems feature the problematic drivers. However, Vista SP1 will still be widely available for download via the Microsoft Download Center. And only in April will Microsoft start serving Vista SP1 though Automatic Updates. The initial delivery of Vista SP1 will only feature the English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese editions of the service pack. The remaining languages will RTM in April.

"While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers. To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers. As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don't have any of the affected device drivers installed. We're taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible," Nash explained.