Microsoft Signals the Death of the Service Pack

On the same day of the general availability of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate 1, Microsoft made another strategic move designed to signal the imminent death of the service pack. The Redmond company has been constantly pushing to the foreground the Windows Updates infrastructure to the detriment of the model that involves servicing its software products through major update releases. This is why, on the same day that market the delivery of Vista SP1 RC, Nick White, Microsoft Product Manager, working with the Vista team, choose to focus on a reliability and performance update for the operating system rather than on the service pack.

"Surely it's no news to you that we use Windows Update to continually deliver ongoing improvements to our customers so that Windows is always up-to-date. Plus, doing so eliminates the need to wait for larger releases like service packs. Some updates are released to the community for general feedback prior to delivery via Windows Update, as is the case today. The Windows Serviceability Team today is rolling out another update on the Microsoft Download Center. The update is categorized as a "preview release" and may be subject to change before it is released via Windows Update (we expect that to occur in January)," White revealed.

In Microsoft's perspective the practice of issuing service packs is wight on track to becoming completely obsolete. The company is focusing instead on a strategy to update its products via minor refreshes pushed as individual updates, rather than Service Pack bundles. At this point in time there is no clear indication of when Microsoft might implement the update model and scrap Service Packs for good, but one thing is clear. That day will surely come.

"Today's update preview release is geared toward improving reliability and performance in Windows Vista and we highly encourage you to install it. It includes improvement of previous issues affecting going into or resuming from sleep/hibernate under some scenarios; update to address a previous issue with the disk spindown feature to improve battery life for portable systems and up to 15% improved performance of disk I/O (i.e., copying/moving/deleting large files)," White added.