On February 4 MS announced they were releasing the much awaited Vista Service Pack 1 to Manufacturing.   What they did not mean, apparently, was that anyone would have access to the bits until mid-March in order to give device driver writers time to catch up with some issues identified between SP-1 and the specific device drivers in question.

The reaction around the web has been swift and brutal.  Especially checking on the Vista Blog the vast majority of the reactions were negative.  People who posted comments were concerned that MS trusted them to test the bits but did not trust them to use them.  Some IT professionals were concerned that the leak of the Service Pack via Bit-Torrent ahead of an official release would give hackers a lead in looking for loopholes over corporate deployments.

In my case, I’m just stunned by the idiocy of the whole thing.  If the bits are golden, why shouldn’t we have them?  If they aren’t golden, then why announce?  I can see an argument for not putting the SP-1 on Windows Update, but give those of us with a little technical savvy, your early adopters and testers, a chance to go ahead and play with the SP.