Not a member of MSDN of TechNet Plus, an official SP1 beta tester or a volume licensee?  Then you’ll be waiting 6 more weeks for Vista SP1 RTM.  Bah and humbug.  What a lousy way to treat paying customers.  We’ve fixed the problems you asked us to fix, but guess what, you can’t have the fixes for 6 more weeks.

In a blog entry on Keith Combs’ Blahg Keith delivers himself of this gem,"If Microsoft chooses not to release some software when you think it should be released, we usually have a darn good reason for the decision."  Does that strike you as funny?  Darn good reasons don’t need to be secret.  That’s how they work and the reason why they are darn good reasons.  When people hear a darn good reason most of them know it for what it is and say, "Hey, that’s a darn good reason."

I don’t think there are any reasons most of Microsoft’s customers would accept as darn good for not releasing SP1 now.  Here’s what I think is going on.  SP1 breaks something in a key driver or drivers in equipment from one or more major MS OEM partner(s).  The break is not necessarily bad or fatal but if SP1 were released to the unwashed masses, support calls to the OEM(s) in question would go through the roof.  The OEM(s) asked for and got a reprieve to push out patches to drivers and MS agreed.

So the bottom line is that MS is willing to screw the installed base in order to make this/these OEM(s) happy.