Or just the same old Vista?

Aug 30, 2007 15:59 GMT  ·  By

Will Service Pack 1 be the second coming for Windows Vista? During his address at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2007, Mike Sievert, Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Marketing admitted that Vista was released into a world that was not 100% ready for the operating system. Microsoft's most secure Windows platform to date faced a luxuriant array of problems from the get go with impact on compatibility, support, reliability, performance and ultimately consumer perception. The most illustrative aspect of the issues synonymous with Vista is the fact that customers were shy of the operating system in the beginning and that, 60 million shipped licenses and seven months later, they're are still not crowding to buy it. In this context, SP1 has the potential to be the ultimate patch for Vista and fuel adoption. However, Microsoft has downplayed the relevance of the service pack while pushing Windows Update into the foreground.

"It's a watershed event for a lot of customers," said Al Gillen, research vice president at IDC, according to SeattlePI. "Once upon a time that was a really important thing, because you didn't have things like the Windows Update service that we have today. So the patches and the fixes that you get on an ongoing basis were hard to come by, and generally speaking you got them in the form of a service pack. Now, today ... those patches tend to get to you a lot faster. So technically, the impact of a service pack is a lot less pervasive than it would have been a few years ago. But mentally, it's still an important milestone, I believe. For a lot of customers, they still wait to see a service pack because they feel that is the point in time where a Microsoft product has gotten to a level of testing or reliability where they have the confidence that the product is going to be stable enough for them to use."

And then again there are perspectives such as the one shared in July by Gianfranco Lanci, President of Acer. Lanci trashed Vista as a disappointment and stated that the first service pack will not change a thing. Still, Microsoft is indeed cooking the evolution of Vista, preparing to soften the operating system's rough edges. "Vista SP1 will address specific reliability and performance issues, such as copying files and shutdown time. It will support new types of hardware and emerging standards, like EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) and ExFat (a new file format that will be used in flash memory storage and consumer devices). It will also include some management, deployment, and support improvements, such as adding the ability to detect and correct common file sharing problems to Network Diagnostics," explained Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President of the Windows Core Operating System division at Microsoft.

What do you think? Will SP1 breathe new life into your copy of Windows Vista? Will it convince you to upgrade from XP if you haven't done it already?