Patching is Broken - Shock horror - Film at 11

In early May, I had the opportunity to meet with Steve Ballmer and I told him that patching was just too hard. And because it was so hard, people did not do it. I asked him to make it easier.

I'm glad to say he, and Microsoft was listening! I'm doing research today for an article for ESM magazine. I came across a statement from Scott Charney at Microsoft made at TechEd inDallas in June. He he states: So I started looking at it, and what I realized was patch management was broken. It is broken

Wonder why he started looking at it? :-)

But luck over timing aside, what I find slightly amusing is his reasoning as to why this problem exists. Charney says: And one of the interesting things I learned is the things that make Microsoft a great company is also what made patch management unworkable. ... our company is very decentralized, very end-user empowered and very Darwinian. You can have a group over here that says, "I have a good idea and I'm going to build something," and a group over here that says, "Well, you know what, that's not a bad idea but we can build a better mousetrap over here and we're going to build ours," and another group will say, "We're going to build ours." And what ended up happening, of course, is today there are eight different installer technologies within Microsoft.

I guess I'm glad that, at long last, MS understand this and is working to fix it. But what I'm currently keeping my eye on is his statement that: "By the end of the year, instead of eight installer technologies we will have two, one for operating systems and one for applications. "

I'm watching...