Adrian Marsden wrote:
Actually, what this whole situation proves is that a company with an installed
base that figures in, what, the 90th percentile has an incredible amount of
testing to do but that a talented individual can create a patch and issue it
basically untested with the appropriate disclaimer quite rapidly.
In this instance the patch didn't fix the vulnerable code at the source and was truly a
"patch". Had MS issued that patch immediately it seems to me that you would have
criticised them for putting out a "half-assed" patch. Had they issued their actual patch
untested and it broke a couple of percent of their user base's installs you probably would have
castigated them for being irresponsible and not testing the patch.
What actually occured was that they, as is their policy, issued the best workaround they
could, (unreg the .dll), and promised a patch by a certain date. They beat the schedule
by what 25%, maybe 50% from the time they made the promise. In any performance evaluation
one would have to conclude that MS performed "better than expected".
I would agree that not asking for improvement ever would lead to further
mediocrity but at the same time, placing anyone in a no-win situation _all_ the
time eventually leads to them losing interest. Giving credit where it is due
isn't unfair in this situation and in the end you always get more with sugar
than you do vinegar.
I am not criticizing Microsoft over the patch. I am happy.
I am just saying that we as an industry got used to False Positives,
slow responses, etc. We should demand more and this situation proved it
is possible.
Gadi.
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