Well, to try to be fair, it probably fixes a few thousand small and
medium sized bugs in the Microsoft software and perhaps a few hundred
really massive f**k-ups in the Microsoft software. But they don't
want to say that that way.
It likely introduces a few hundred small and medium sized bugs and
introduces a few dozen really massive f**k-ups in their software.
And they REALLY don't want to say that. That's the way most companies
work in the bug fix game.
They made some incomprehensibly dumb moves in this. The typical
user didn't get a little banner list of "new features" to read when
it was finished. Look at the side effects of this, the number of
people who posted thinking that the change of the spash screen might
be a failure, the number of people posting that they don't know how
to safely get around changes in behavior in their mailer or their
web browser (and thus think it is a bug or get around it in an
unsafe manner). Likely far more had these same questions and didn't
post. And Microsoft made other dumb or even stupid moves in doing
this, maybe even on purpose, who knows.
Likely most folks who have a clean generic vanilla system should
have few problems. But the whole point of this, or at least most
of the point of this, was that this was going to be installed on
many machines were already compromised. I don't see any evidence
that anything in the release of SP2 tried to prepare for that. It
seems to be a contradiction that it can simultaneously claimed:
the failure rate is near zero
the failure rate is almost all due to viruses, spyware and stupid users
and
the typical customer's machine is crawling with virus,spyware,stupid users
If viruses and spyware and stupid users (the terms used by folks
here, not by me) made it likely that SP2 was going to fail on install
and they are present on so many machines then I find it hard for
the supporters to still claim the failure rate is near zero. But
perhaps that is because there is little real data on the actual
failure rate, and whoever has it isn't talking.
Far too many people say "it worked on the 1 or even 10 machines I
tried so it must work everywhere and it is your fault if it didn't."
Equally bad are the people who say "it didn't work on my 1 or even
10 machines I tried so it must not work anywhere and it is Microsoft's
problem that it doesn't." Both those are taking a tiny and
unrepresentative sample and then assuming that the whole world is
just like theirs. Now, to be clear, I don't EVER blame a customer
for a screw-up in the delivery of a product, unlike some here.
If what some of the supporters here claim are true then it seems
that the failure rate could have been reduced by a factor of ten,
perhaps even more, without needing any amazing leap in what was
done, just checking for and avoiding some of the biggest problems
that it was going to face. It seems inexcusible that this wasn't
done.
