re: looking for bugs in Vista at the moment is the right thing to do, but to say that by finding a bug constitutes a security risk just makes me laugh

David Overton — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:51:49 GMT

Tim,

I have to disagree with you on many counts. We have 600 million PCs world wide running Windows and 400m running Office. Vista is no longer downloadable - it was only ever advertised to partners and strong IT Pros, which is not the majority of the populous. It was not cover mounted, mentioned by us in the Sunday Times or Mail on Sunday. We allowed about 2.5m licenses to be had - you have to activate Vista, so no installing it on 20 machines - and this includes the MSDN, Beta programme, partner kits etc. Office we provide an online trial to stop people downloading, but this is less of a security impact for people as it tends to be the OS that people try to compromise.

We want feedback - there are over 1/2 million devices that work on PCs today- we can not test them all. We are not building a product for MS users, but other people, so we want your opinion as to what works and does not work.

2.5M copies vs 600M machines means that <1/2% of the IT Base will be able to test Vista - this is not screaming to everyone to test. Now - to our partners - yes, but we hope you would want to see how you can build a business around it.

On the scrutiny front - I personally welcome people poking holes in the product, but then suggesting these holes will nto be fixed before release is where I find it stretching the line a bit too much.

You should not (yet) find it available to every TD&H, not until we have a real release candidate, then it might go broarder, but even then I would be amazed if we distributed 10M RC copies.

ttfn

David

re: looking for bugs in Vista at the moment is the right thing to do, but to say that by finding a bug constitutes a security risk just makes me laugh

Tim Long — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:39:36 GMT

Well Microsoft is hoisted by its own ptard. This is a consequence of releasing beta software so ubiquitously. Office 2007 (and vista) are no longer beta products - they are released but unsupported. With the bits so widely available and Microsoft screaming "download it now!" then it's not really surprising that beta software starts to get the same "media attention" and security scrutiny as shipping product, when every Tom, *** and Harry are running it on their desktop. Well you know what they say - there's no such thing as bad publicity ;-)