So over a week after the surprise drop of Windows Server 2003 SP2, the product team blogs the following:

Rapid customer adoption of Windows Server 2003 SP2 continues.  In less than a week since release there were more than 400,000 successful downloads!  Interesting that some have commented that we “quietly” released SP2.  The trade press have certainly covered it, since November when we broadly publicized the Release Candidate and product details, and at launch last week. At last count there were several dozen news stories about SP2 over the last week, and many blog posts.  SP2 also required less advance education compared to SP1 or XP SP2, because (by design) it is generally much easier for customers to “consume.”

You send an alert the Friday before saying there would be no security patches the next Tuesday. Any IT department larger than 1 person normally considers that a cancellation of the mandatory around-the-clock patch testing and deployment work cycle that you put your customers through every second Tuesday of the month.

Then you “quietly” release SP2, though I’m not sure why you’d quote a factual description but I’ll play along. Quietly means without announcing the release. At the time of it showing up on Microsoft Update there was no email. There was no announcement. There wasn’t even an announcement page on Microsoft Technet.

Even your own employees had no idea this was coming!

So after putting us through series of ineffective DST patches, after not following even your own procedures for publicizing the release date of service packs, after admitting that you messed up by pulling high priority classification from MU hours after it was placed there, after years of the “patch-or-die” security track record that leaves everyone not patching with an exploitable system with 0–day attacks… After all that you have the decency to poke fun at the people that alert the public when you mess up and pretend nothing went wrong? Here’s a quote for you Joel:

“Fuck you, you jackass!”

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE
CEO, Own Web Now Corp
Microsoft Partner whose 14 data center network wastes millions of dollars in overtime dealing with Microsoft security patches, hotfixes and service packs.

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