As soon as they put the bean counters in charge, there is no one left who knows what the truth is that will be allowed to talk for the company officially. That is the pattern I saw repeatedly during my years in Southern California dealing with software firms that were successful. Earlier in their evolution there was a free flow of information and things got fixed because “power users” spoke directly to people with the ability and position to deal with problems. Then “customer relations” was separated and the system broke down.

The development cycle degenerated as programmers found batches of bug reports dumped on their desk when they were about to start the newest version, and there was no attempt to sort them, and rarely enough information to determine what the real problem was.

In the corporate world you have the sales force telling customers that systems will do things that no one can do, and then the tech guys have to roll back expectations.

At some point everything becomes marketing and the product gets ignored.

Consider for example, that *officially* M$ have been wanting to kill off XP for two years now. Yet, they *secretly* released a whole new version with an updated kernel and core system and integrated SP3 Oct/Nov 2009. I say secretly because it was not publicly announced and is only available to MSDN members (which I still am, even though I told them to go *you-know-what* themselves over three years ago. What a bunch of morons. Mind you, I still get Apple updates and bulletins etc, and I told them to drop dead in 2007. *shrug* I’ve been using the new XP a couple months now, and it’s definitely an improvement. However, if anyone were to buy XP from a shop, they would probably get the 2005 update at best.

They can’t fix it now, Badtux – it’s a historical artifact 😉

– Badtux the Security Penguin

I don’t need it for Windows updates, but there are other updates I need that only work with IE, with is a complaint I have made to the companies involved, without any luck. The problem is all of the people who use their Win boxes without modification and have become a potential botnet for the ne’er-do-wells and script-kiddies. They don’t realize what they are inviting, and a few of them, as you note, Lady Min, are corporate IT people. They want everything uniform, even if it is uniformly bad and dangerous.

My virus software tells me when M$ has issued a security update, so I can go and get it. Actually, it nags me if I don’t get security updates with flag messages and changes its little system tray icon from green to orange.

I just updated to indicate the French and Aussies have joined the Germans in telling people to stop using IE, so the pressure is building.

AutoPatcher

Current version is 1.2, there us a user guide (PDF) and a good FAQ & Forum (all accessable from the Downloads page). One advantage to APUP (and it’s a huge one!) is that the Updates resolves the usual M$ update conflicts, and installes the updates in the correct order. All updates are d/l from M$ Update site directly and saved in the designated location. If you put it on a USB key or external HDD, you can use the same updates one several PC’s (even with different versions of XP). So you only need to waste your bandwidth and time once if you have more than 1 PC. 🙂 Also, APUP allows you to turn off the most common Windoze annoyingly useless memory eating *features*. 🙂 Though, the BEST tool for that IMHO, is xp-AntiSpy, which works on all Windoze from 2000 to Win7.

Another I’ve used is: Windows Update Downloader, from a member of the MSFN -Micro$oft Software Forum Network. There are a bunch of useful Windoze projects there.

Someone recently told me about this one, but I haven’t used it. It says *free* to download… but I get the impression you have to pay to use it. I could be wrong… *shrug*

Portlock Windows Update Manager

I have a couple others if anyone wants to know, but the above should get you started.

I believe you’re correct that someday a netwide attack will come disguised as a windows update. Amazingly I know a few people that are forced to use only IE at their jobs because that is the only browser allowed on their computers.

It is supposedly trusted and many people have turned on automatic update, so the defenses are dropped to permit it.

The reason it was only 26, is that you didn’t need the corrupted updates that generated their own update to fix the new problem. They do generate periodic combined updates that group many of the individual updates, If you hit it right you can make do with a single update that covers months of patches.

One can only hope, Kryten, that the EU forces M$ to start competing again, which means actually hiring people to fix products on a long-term basis, instead of just outsourcing the work whenever someone bring a problem to their attention.