Some of it, in my opinion, is to satisfy those old philosophy that no OS is ready for deployment until SP1 is released. I know a few "experts" where I work that insist that we should hold off for that exact reason. No matter that Win7 is an extension of Vista that fixes so many issues and has been really poured over by millions of users.
Not too surprised. I expected them to have a laundry list of fixes and features they just didn't get around to, and there will undoubtedly be some more bugs surface in the next few months as more and more users join the Windows 7 family.
In the meantime though, I'm in no hurry to see a SP1 when I keep hearing people talk about how much they love 7.
And yes, I'm still on XP. That is, until I get the time I need to reinstall all my programs. Can't take a break yet.
Now, if any of you had seen the reports of the contents of the leaked winmain_sp builds released during June, you may not be so cynical regarding the service pack. There are some interesting changes in those builds that never actually made it to the final RTM of Windows 7 - I personally believe that Microsoft planned to add a lot mroe into Windows 7, but due to time constraints were forced to leave some of the features out and roll them up in a service pack.
Since a lot of admins don't even take a second look before the first service pack anyway, the majority of the enterprise market wouldn't miss out on anything, and stripping those features out means Windows 7 became the first OS in recent history that Microsoft has released on time (and perhaps the first in history to be released early; remember Bill mentioning something about "3 years after Vista?" That'd be January.)
Lets just say that I am quietly confident that SP1 will bring more to the table than security rollups and enterprise peace-of-mind.
It's hard to believe that Microsoft is going to significantly enhance the feature set of Windows 7 with the first service pack.
The firm has already said that it will never again release a service pack like XP SP2, where fundamental and significant feature changes/additions are made to the OS. I'm trying to find the relevant link to support this.
In all, I guess it really comes down to speculation over how broad Microsoft's definition of that statement really is, but I'm not betting the farm on SP1 adding much beyond official hotspot support and a security rollup.
@Robert Hallock
XP SP2 was effectively a rewrite of the OS though, to harden it since SP1/gold was woefully inadequate. They postponed development of Vista for that.
That doesn't rule out the possibility that Win7 SP1 will not contain feature updates like the ones shown in the winmain_sp builds. Reason being, is that if these features WERE initially planned, but were scrapped/postponed due to time constraints, threes no reason to believe that the major groundwork for it was already laid down. Microsoft may simply have been forced to have these features unimplemented by the RC cutoff date - That's when the code was effectively frozen, with only bug fixes left. I'm still 85% certain this SP will contain feature updates. You don't need to get the link, I know of that particular comment, but I still believe due to these reasons that 7-SP1 will be an interesting update to the OS.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Comments
In the meantime though, I'm in no hurry to see a SP1 when I keep hearing people talk about how much they love 7.
And yes, I'm still on XP. That is, until I get the time I need to reinstall all my programs. Can't take a break yet.
Since a lot of admins don't even take a second look before the first service pack anyway, the majority of the enterprise market wouldn't miss out on anything, and stripping those features out means Windows 7 became the first OS in recent history that Microsoft has released on time (and perhaps the first in history to be released early; remember Bill mentioning something about "3 years after Vista?" That'd be January.)
Lets just say that I am quietly confident that SP1 will bring more to the table than security rollups and enterprise peace-of-mind.
The firm has already said that it will never again release a service pack like XP SP2, where fundamental and significant feature changes/additions are made to the OS. I'm trying to find the relevant link to support this.
In all, I guess it really comes down to speculation over how broad Microsoft's definition of that statement really is, but I'm not betting the farm on SP1 adding much beyond official hotspot support and a security rollup.
XP SP2 was effectively a rewrite of the OS though, to harden it since SP1/gold was woefully inadequate. They postponed development of Vista for that.
That doesn't rule out the possibility that Win7 SP1 will not contain feature updates like the ones shown in the winmain_sp builds. Reason being, is that if these features WERE initially planned, but were scrapped/postponed due to time constraints, threes no reason to believe that the major groundwork for it was already laid down. Microsoft may simply have been forced to have these features unimplemented by the RC cutoff date - That's when the code was effectively frozen, with only bug fixes left. I'm still 85% certain this SP will contain feature updates. You don't need to get the link, I know of that particular comment, but I still believe due to these reasons that 7-SP1 will be an interesting update to the OS.
Thanks for stopping by with your great comments, Alan!