Update Rollup 1, which has been in beta testing for the past month, is being positioned by Microsoft as a more convenient way for users to deploy patches they might have missed when the original vulnerabilities — and associated security bulletins — were posted on the company’s Web site.
When discussion of the Rollup first started, analysts saw it as an attempt by Microsoft to provide an interim pack of security updates prior to the release of a second Service Pack for Windows XP, which at that point wasn’t expected until the middle of 2004.
As recently as last week, however, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in a wide-ranging talk about Microsoft’s security plans, repeated that Service Pack 2 (SP2) would not release until the half-way point of next year.
No matter what the time frame for SP2, the recently-released rollup meets only half of the criteria that analyst Michael Cherry, of Directions on Microsoft, a research firm that tracks Microsoft’s moves in the marketplace, thinks is necessary for success.
Such a CD would be a better way to get the 9MB rollup out to customers, such as consumers and small business users, who access the Internet through slow dial-up connections.
One way that the rollup may be used, he added, would be by OEMs, which could conceivably add it to their Windows XP distributions they pre-load on new PCs.
In his speech last week at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Ballmer announced that the Redmond, Wash.-based developer would switch to a monthly schedule for non-critical security updates, replacing the sporadic Wednesday bulletins and patches.
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