Lazycoder

backporting patches

Personal Opinion – Should MS back port some of the XP IE SP2 fixes to older versions of Windows?

How well do they support their products after the end of program support? Take the case of Windows 2000. How much support should one expect from Microsoft 4 1/2 years after that product has shipped? NT4? Its been 8 years since that shipped. WinME? 4 years.

hmmm, consumers don’t think of software products in terms of years, they think of them in terms of releases. When you look at it that way, Windows 2000, desktop releases at least, is the one right before XP. Would you expect a major security patch to be applied to the last version of any other software product you purchased if a lot of people were still using it?

My feeling is that they are using the new features, including some security fixes, as leverage to get people to upgrade. Using new features to entice people to upgrade is groovy in my book, using new security features is not.