I've come to believe that the number of the Service Pack for any Microsoft product actually is code for how they feel about the release.
- Initial Release = "Hey this doesn't crash for most people! Good luck getting any work done with it though!"
- SP1 = "Ok, all the really broken crap is fixed. But it's still now how it should be"
- SP2 = "This is about as good as it'll get. You can probably depend on it now"
- SP3 = "You really should upgrade to our latest product, but here's an update in case you don't want to pay us"
- SP4 = "Dude, this product is totally dead. Why are you even still using it?"
For different products, there might be a +/- factor of 1 SP release or so.
I'd point out that Apple loves to do the same thing. Someone should chart the MacOS 10.x.y releases in the same way. It seems like y is consistently greater than 5 before the series is retired.
The open source world is a little different. There, nothing ever reaches 1.0.
This post was inspired by the performance suckage that is Outlook 2007. I finally joined the downgrading bandwagon.
Comments (2)
Believe it or not, as bad as Outlook 2007 is, I've heard Visual Studio 2005 (pre-SP1) is actually worse. Don't know how much better it gets after you apply SP1.
Posted by Ramesh Dharan | February 28, 2007 11:59 AM
Posted on February 28, 2007 11:59
Hello. I am a Program Manager on the Outlook team at Microsoft. I saw this post discussing the performance issues you’ve seen in Outlook 2007 and I wanted to let you and your readers know that we’ve released an update designed to improve performance in Outlook 2007, especially for large mail stores.
You can read more details about the update in this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/willkennedy/
Here is a direct link to the download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C262BCFD-1E09-49B6-9003-C4C47539DF66&displaylang=en
Thanks for your support.
- Jared Brown [MSFT]
Posted by Jared Brown [MSFT] | April 20, 2007 8:18 AM
Posted on April 20, 2007 08:18