This has caused a firestorm of furor among Windows Vista Ultimate owners, many of whom have opined that MS should give them a free upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate by way of apology for failures to deliver on the aforementioned promises of valuable extras and add-ons. I can understand this sentiment, but have to observe that while charity may now be Bill Gates only and primary avocation, charity has never been a priority for the company he founded. Frankly, I don’t see this happening, though it would be nice if MS did relent, and offer a half-price ($160?) upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate on more or less the same terms as what they offered for Home Premium and Business/Professional versions.

To enterprise users and admins, however, this whole phenomenon is just a sideshow. For them the real unanswered questions are “How much will volume licensing for Windows 7 cost? What kinds of cost differentials apply to Windows 7 Business versus Windows 7 Enterprise?” These are the burning queries that must be answered to help them figure out when it makes sense to switch over to Windows 7, and how much that move is going to cost.

In describing the product, Thurrot starts by listing what’s been rumored or reported about the product that isn’t true. Here goes my summary/recap:

• it’s not a “cloud computing AV solution” though it does support near-real-time updates
• There’s no managed firewall
• There’s no management facility for multiple computers on a home network
• There’s no application controls nor GPO capability

According to Thurrot, what MSE does have to offer essentially boils down to “OneCare minus the stuff that’s not related to fighting malware.” He also goes on to describe MSE as “small, fast, light, and effective.” Right after that he starts to elicit some incredulity when he says “…and since it’s built on the same award-winning underpinnings as Microsoft’s other security products you know you can trust it.” Wait a minute: is this for real. Yep! When I go off to look at the latest Virus Bulletin 100 (aka vb100) there it is with a vb100 sticker (but it appears that Thurrot is really talking about ForeFront which has also earned vb100s consistently starting as far back as June 2007 ).

I have to say that MSE appears to be a real boon, especially for users in need of low-cost/no-cost protection for virtual machines as well as real ones. According to Thurrot the public beta will commence next Tuesday on June 23. I think we’re going to have to check this out!

Recently, lots of published accounts have mentioned that MS is now testing Morro internally in-house, and is preparing a public beta of the technology (see this ComputerWorld story, for example). This Reuters newswire story posted on Wednesday, June 10, indicates that this beta will be unleashed “soon.” Interestingly, stock values for both Symantec and McAfee dropped with this news, with investors guessing that those companies will lose (paying customer) market share in the face of an at least potentially credible free product. Well-known Windows maven Paul Thurrot is quoted in the ComputerWorld story as suggesting that news of the imminent beta was leaked prematurely, and that “…it wasn’t supposed to be today,” apparently confirming that “soon” means “not yet.”

When the product does make its appearance, even enterprise administrators might find it worthwhile for certain applications. Chief among these will be the new Windows XP Mode available in copies of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. Even VMs need security software, and this could be just the ticket for sufficient coverage to keep those occasionally used virtual desktops safe and secure.

Of the 10 bulletins issues, half (5) are critical, and fill some gaping widely-known holes in MS security. Chief among these: the dual WebDAV gothas for IIS publicized in May (explained in this Ryan Naraine blog from 5/19) and the infamous Pwn2Own vulnerability discovered in March at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver.

I downloaded mine for Vista yesterday and they appear to have installed and taken without a hitch. You’ll probably want to start testing these right away, if you don’t plan to deploy them as-is.

I now understand that XP Mode is a kind of do-it-yourself or roll-your-own version of what MED-V provides as an adminstrator-handled and centrally managed capability for businesses at all scales (though it started with an enterprise target specifically in mind), Microsoft Product Manager Ron Oelgiesser told me yesterday that “even businesses with 100 or 200 users who want to run virtualization” can benefit from MED-V technology. Simply put, it’s designed to allow trained IT professionals (administrators) to design, build, and maintain standard VM images, and to make delivering those images to end users as simple as opening a utility and picking a virtual machine by some readily intelligible name for use (for example “accounts payable” or “call center”). Behind the scenes, the admins are responsible for putting those VM’s together, and updating them as new drivers, updates, and other changes come down the road. Users simply load them and use them as needed, which represents a technique for making good use of virtualization that’s just about as easy as it gets.

From the admin side, things aren’t too shabby either. Microsoft provides a QuickStart guide that shows them how to put VMs together, and test them to make sure they work as desired, then make them available for general access and use with the MED-V client components on end-user desktops. MED-V comes as part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack that is only available to customers who sign up for Microsoft Customer Assurance. Best of all, according to Oelgiesser, the incremental cost of adding a MED-V component to an existing Assurance subscription is “less than $10 per seat per year.” Considering that this includes an XP SP3 license on which to run legacy apps, as well as a nifty set of tools for packaging, distributing, and managing VMs, this is a fantastic value.

Thus, even though MS will be giving away the XP Mode components with higher-end Windows 7 licenses, I predict that MED-V will also enjoy considerable adoption and use, even from SMBs. Oelgiesser confirms that MS feels bullish on MED-V as well, and indicates that some adoption for Vista has already begun among existing Assurance program participants. Should be interesting to see how this all turns out, once Windows 7 goes commercial.

In any case, SP2 should become publicly available on demand through Windows Update, possibly before the end of May, and perhaps by the middle of that month. In my own testing with the beta, I found updated machines were significantly more stable than SP1 machines, particularly in environments where users are prone to installing and/or uninstalling programs on a regular basis.

Certainly, you’ll want to test SP2 for yourself in your production evironments to see what’s what. You should also put GPOs in place to block SP2 installation from end-users until such testing is complete, and send out e-mail to educate users on the risks attached to SP updates, because many of them will want to jump on this release for their home or family PCs. Be sure to tell them to back up their PCs completely before applying the SP, to avoid in-process errors that might leave a machine unbootable, or unable to roll back from SP2 to previous levels. You’ll also want to warn them about the potential for application conflicts or errors, particularly for any legacy software that may belong to your production environment.

Except for the potential for breaking some software, though, the prognosis for Vista SP2 seems pretty positive overall. Be sure to check it out for yourself at the earliest opportunity!

I’ve been working with the 64-bit Vista RC version of SP2 for nearly three weeks and so far, it’s been remarkably stable. If my own experience is any guide, Vista admins can look forward not just to some nice boosts to functionality (Feature Pack for Wireless, improved Wi-Fi performance after sleep mode resumption, improved RSS feeds sidebar, and built-in support for burning Blu-ray media) but also to some increased stability as well. Enterprise versions will also benefit from improved power management for both servers and desktops, as well as better backward compatibility for Terminal Server License keys.

It’s not yet clear whether Microsoft will indeed get the downloads posted before April 30 comes and goes, as they had originally promised. If not, given that the bits are already available and in circulation on BitTorrent, I’d have to guess that they won’t show up much later than early next week in any case. Based on recent precedent, this means that SP2 should become available on demand from Windows Update some time in late May or early June, and will become a mandatory download later this year. A tool to block the SP2 download should also become available very soon, if not at the same time as the SP2 download, then some time soon thereafter.

Vista versus Windows 7 Satisfaction Rates, early on

According to the same survey, the reasons for the difference in opinion include improvements in performance and resource consumption, ease of installation, plus improved functionality and usability. Thus, it should come as no suprise that Windows 7 is also emerging as something of a Vista killer, in the sense that more corporate Windows users are abandoning their plans to migrate to Vista in favor of waiting for Windows 7 to become available. More than half of survey respondents (53%) indicated they would skip Vista, while only 15% indicated they would proceed with planned Vista rollouts in any case. Likewise 14% of respondents also indicated their organizations would defer Windows PC and server purchases to wait for Windows 7 to become publicly available.

It will be interesting to see if these numbers hold up when ordinary users get their hands on Windows 7 after the beta period ends, and the commercial version becomes available. Based on my own experience with that beta, though, I suspect that even garden-variety Windows users will find a lot to like about this latest version, particularly those looking for something a bit more attractive and user-friendly for netbook/notebook use. To me this also adds more urgency to the big question about Windows 7 — namely, whether it will retain its current Q1 2010 release date, or if market forces and momentum can push that date forward into Q4 2009. I have to guess that Microsoft and the PC makers will find some merit in going public sooner rather than later simply because of its potential impact on and benefit to holiday PC sales.

What I’ve had ongoing trouble with right up to the present is with Vista’s complexity and lack of incisive controls. On certain hardware configurations, I’ve repeatedly found myself in situations where Vista would keep limping along, but an increasing number of applications would fade into the “Not Responding” state. At the same time, I found myself unable to bail out of the OS using either CTRL-ALT-ESC to get into Task Manager, or CTRL-ALT-DEL to call up the login/logout/control screen. Rebooting to re-establish system stability is kind of a cop-out anyway, but I’ll be darned if either the System or Application logs in Event Viewer can provide me with any data about what caused my system to hang, and required me to peform yet another “disruptive shutdown” to regain control over my machine.

In working with Windows 7, I’ve been able to get the two “attention sequences” (CTRL-ALT-DEL and CTRL-ALT-ESC) to work as they should even when the system got extremely flaky owing to installation of an obviously incompatible driver. I have to ask: why won’t Vista work the same way? I’m not ready to put this OS in the same class as malware, and I do believe I’ve reached an “uneasy rapprochement” with Vista, to the point where I can get along with it on a day-to-day basis and keep my own and my users’ machines up and running most of the time. But I keep wondering why it gets flaky from time to time, and how I might be better able to maintain stable, long-term operation (for more discussion see my March 12 Blog at ViztaView.com).

If anybody has any wisdom to dispense here, or any war stories or hard-earned experience to share, please chime in. Surely it’s better for us to suffer together, than to do so alone! Just because you think Windows Vista is out to get you, doesn’t mean you’re paranoid.

Today's downloads are all about SP2 RC

Careful inspection of these listings, however, reveals that all of them still include the word “Beta,” even though all are indeed new files that posted yesterday. Only the DVD ISO includes a filename that specifically mentions RC2–namely, 6002.16670.090130-1715_iso_update_sp_wave0-RCSP2.0_DVD.iso.

Other downloads simply reference their associated KB articles by number, as with the IA64-based offering that appears at the top of the listing shown in the preceding screenshot–namely, Windows6.0-KB948465-IA64.exe. Here again, these articles specifically reference the SP2 beta releases, and make no mention of the Release Candidate itself.

This leads me to a couple of contemplative musings:

• If you want to see what’s in RC2, you’ll want to download and inspect the DVD ISO download
• Microsoft will probably either be issuing a clarification soon, or will replace those other downloads with RC2-labeled materials and KB articles

We’re all going to have to stay tuned to see what happens next. Very interesting! As for myself, I’m downloading the ISO image right now, and will use Daemon Tools to see what’s inside as soon as the download finishes (in 28 more minutes according to the download manager).