Microsoft Sort of Releases Vista SP1

Today the service pack released to manufacturing, which should mean fairly immediate availability. Microsoft typically makes a new service pack available immediately, or within a few days, of RTM. But SP1 won't be available until mid-March, not that IT organizations—presumably the majority of them—would want the update quickly, anyway.

Microsoft is taking a different approach with Service Pack 1. In a blog post this morning, Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Product management, laid out the reasons the update availability would be concurrent with "the availability of Windows Vista SP1 on new PCs and in stores." He wrote:

"There are a couple of reasons for this. 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."

I read that to mean: SP1 really isn't ready yet, but there's going to be RTM anyway. On the one hand, I commend Microsoft for trying to fix the problem with Vista's first release—that the new operating system got out before there were enough supporting hardware drivers. Microsoft should avoid repeating this kind of problem, for the benefit of the Windows experience. On the other hand, why didn't Microsoft delay the RTM announcement and work with its partners to fix the problems?

Vista has got enough perception problems without Microsoft adding on more. One of SP1's roles: Installing confidence that Windows Vista is ready for prime-time IT. Ready should mean ready, and that's not the case with SP1 RTM.