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The folks at Neowin have been checking the Windows Service Pack Roadmap and noticed an update this Tuesday that preliminarily placed Windows XP SP3 in 1H2008 and Windows Server 2003 SP2 definitely in 1Q2007.
XP SP3 had already been delayed from 2006 to 2007 and this latest move received a poor reception with Vista marketing conspiracy theories abounding. Whatever the Microsoft rationale, the primary utility of a late service pack like SP3 is to roll up all the fixes since the last service pack - in this case, XP SP2 in August 2004 making nearly 4 years of patches. Given the number of monthly security patches Microsoft is generating these days, it’s already quite an annoyance installing an XP SP2 system and then downloading and applying all the patches and this means no relief is in sight. That’s why 3rd parties are creating their own rollups (e.g. AutoPatcher) in the absence of official service packs. With the users creating their own security patches and their own service packs maybe Microsoft ought to consider subcontracting?
As for Windows Server 2003, SP2 availability had been expected this year, but the delay is less annoying since SP1 was released in March 2005, so it’s only about a two year gap. Speaking of which, Bink.nu reports that Beta Refresh 2 of SP2 was released to testers today.
Now that the competitors have reported quarterly earnings and Apple and Google have done very well, speculation naturally turns to what Microsoft is going to report next Thursday (Oct. 26). Michael Paige at MarketWatch has the analyst consensus:
Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software company, is expected Thursday (to) report that its quarterly profit came in little changed from a year ago as it continues to invest in key new and upcoming products, with revenue rising just more than 10%, analysts forecast.
Microsoft will have earned 31 cents a share for its fiscal first quarter, unchanged from the same period a year earlier, according the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson First Call.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 is projected to increase to $10.75 billion from $9.74 billion, based on the average of analysts’ estimates.
MSFTextrememakeover catalogs the recent bad news (including the latest estimates for the cost of the still unannounced Vista upgrade coupons this holiday season) and has a more disconcerting idea:
Worse, take the rumored higher R&D number (and likely negative fallout), the hit from the anticipated Vista rebate program, the likely increased costs associated with making the recent product changes to please the European Commission, rumors of heavy Xbox discounting in Japan as a last-ditch effort to try and salvage that situation, and the fact that buybacks - though aggressive - are unlikely to have secured the shares that would have been retired via the tender (and were needed to make the revised earnings guidance for the year), and there seems to be a growing risk for a relatively weak Q and more importantly, downward earnings guidance for the rest of the fiscal. Now, I don’t want to be Chicken Little, but if that happens, especially against the backdrop of AAPL and GOOG continuing to knock it out of the park, MSFT is going to reestablish itself as a laggard - both as a company and as a stock.
Stay tuned.
As Microsoft’s earnings report approaches next week, here are some brief notes on the results reported this week by other industry players.
Google Inc. on Thursday posted a 92 percent jump in quarterly profit and revenue near the top end of expectations as the company tightened its grip on the Web search market, sending its shares up 6.7 percent.
Rob Hof says that’s “a whole bunch more YouTubes.” Continuing:
“It was a clean beat quarter,” said Tim Boyd, an analyst with Caris & Co. “These guys just continue to kill it. The stock should be going up from here. The number one question is what can (they) do with YouTube and how quickly it can have an impact.”
More details here including the fact that 40% of revenues come from non-Google owned sites. Maybe Microsoft will rethink their disdain for 3rd party publishers.
Apple Computer Inc. shares climbed almost 6 percent Thursday after beating Wall Street’s profit expectations for its fourth quarter on strong sales of its iPod and Macintosh computers.
…
After the markets closed Wednesday, Apple said it shipped 8.7 million iPods, up 35 percent from the year-ago period. A good back-to-school season also helped Apple ship a record 1.6 million computers, up 30 percent from a year earlier, breaking its previous record of 1.38 million units in the first fiscal quarter of 2000.
The sizzling sales put Apple’s fiscal 2006 revenue at a record $19.3 billion, up from its previous all-time high of $13.9 billion last year.
Paul Thurrott notes that despite growing faster than the overall PC market, Apple’s share is still less than 3%. Regardless, you have to give Apple credit for successfully negotiating a processor architecture change.
Yahoo, the world’s largest portal, said yesterday that its profit fell sharply in the third quarter and that growth would continue to slow for two main business lines — graphic display advertising and advertising on Web searches.
The company’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel, was unusually contrite yesterday in a conference call with investors.
…
Search revenue, he said, would substantially increase when Yahoo completed a long-delayed computer system called Project Panama, which will use a new way to determine how ads are placed on search result pages.
Mr. Semel announced that the first customers had started using the system. But only after all of the company’s search advertisers have converted to the new system, sometime after the end of the year, will Yahoo introduce the new auction method, which is the part of the system meant to improve revenue.
Aside from the tardy Panama, Yahoo has an antique reliance on banner ads which have been under pricing pressure.
Others:
With Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer 7 yesterday some problems were inevitable and Barron’s Eric Savitz reports that Reuters has grabbed first dibs on the application incompatibility category:
Reuters yesterday e-mailed a rather alarming sounding message to users of its desktop software products, advising them not to install Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 7.0 browser software. The notice said that there are “many issues that surround the support of this new release with your Reuters desktop solutions.” And they had a warning to offer:
Reuters will not support Internet Explorer 7.0 for any Reuters product deployed on the desktop for the foreseeable future
Reuters desktop products will not function with Internet Explorer 7.0
This is not a Reuters unique issue. Throughout the software industry, support for this release is a major issue
The Reuters Support Center (RSC) cannot assist any client with removing Internet Explorer 7.0 or downgrading from Internet Explorer 7.0 to 6.0.
Whoa!
Maybe Reuters didn’t get the news that IE7 was on the way? More seriously, expect a bunch more similar stories from vendors who weren’t particularly proactive in testing and accommodating IE7 although not supporting “for the foreseeable future” seems a bit drastic. Also many large businesses will have internal holds on IE7 installations until they can confirm the compatibility of their internal applications.
And, of course, what would a browser be without a security vulnerability? IE7 may only be 24 hours old, but it has got one already:
Less than 24 hours after the launch of Internet Explorer 7, security researchers are poking holes in the new browser.
Danish security company Secunia reported today that IE7 contains an information disclosure vulnerability, the same one it reported in IE6 in April. The vulnerability affects the final version of IE7 running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
If a surfer uses IE7 to visit a maliciously crafted Web site, that site could exploit the security flaw to read information from a separate, secure site to which the surfer is logged in. That could enable an attacker to read banking details, or messages from a Web-mail account, said Thomas Kristensen, Secunia’s chief technology officer.
It’s not particularly easy to exploit, but it’s the thought that counts. The Secunia advisory is here.
Update: While we’re on the subject it’s worth mentioning again that IE7 will be made available by Automatic Update on November 1 and Tony Chor at Microsoft’s IEBlog summarizes the ways you or organization can ” just say no.”
Update: Microsoft says that technically the defect reported by Secunia is an Outlook Express flaw - it’s just that the browsers can be used to exploit it.
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