By Jo Best, 14 May 2004 16:25
NEWS In February, following a series of security alerts and sloppy patching from home users, Microsoft thought the idea of dishing out a CD would help. Now, faced with the much more difficult task of getting Windows XP Service Pack 2 onto users' machines, what is the Redmond behemoth planning to get home and businesses 'packed-up'?
Plans for distribution and promotion aren't final, according to the software giant, but there are some strategies on the table for reaching the XP user at home or at work.
The enterprise user is the easy bit, said Paul Randle, XP product manager: "It's more business as usual...we have more engagement with our enterprise customers."
Independent software vendors and original equipment manufacturers will have their helpdesks ready-prepped by Microsoft and will have a 90-day readiness deadline to get all their products bundled with the service pack.
A company with 1,000 seats running XP is a lot more traceable and likely to be in more regular contact with Microsoft than a sole trader running a business out of his or her front room who may not have filled in their contact details when they registered their copy of XP.
Expect to see SP2 ready for download from the Microsoft website as a priority. With a file size of 80MB, dial-up users might be less than pleased at the prospect of four hours of downloading.
The option of a mass mailout is also popular with Microsoft and quite probably with home users - judging by the popularity of the security patch CD release. This time, Redmond has a large database holding the details of users who bought XP and can contact them with the news, rather than waiting for the orders to roll in.
However, unlike the security patch CD, which hit doormats countrywide without cash changing hands, SP2 will cost users.
Not for the CD itself but for the post and packaging - no figure is currently confirmed but Randle said the £2 mark might be a good bet. Dial-up customers might be slightly annoyed to find they're being charged by a company with tens of billions of dollars in the bank.
Print and online ads are likely to form a part of the SP2 education campaign, as are deals with retailers such as Dixons, who can do some point-of-sale promotion and conceivably inform their customer database of the new release.
One of the more interesting schemes under discussion is Microsoft tapping up the evangelism of the IT pro, asking its own employees to spread the word among friends and relatives in the non-Microsoft world.
But it doesn't stop there. Microsoft has got its eyes on wooing the home-user tech evangelists and early adopters in the wider world for its own ends.
Microsoft is now bouncing around the idea of tech clubs, where home users in the know about SP2 encourage their initiated friends to join in and get downloading.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Joe Buckley
Tech Clubs?
Anyone else remember CPMMSDOSUGUK?
(was it really only (nearly) a quarter of a century ago we used to meet up in the Zerox Social club?
There really is nothing new...
2. steve harris
What is needed here is clarity and simplicity in offline update management: because the PCs that cause me the bother all have 56k modems. Broadband machines are simply not a problem.
Here's my ideal support visit. I pop round a friend's house, plug in a CD and start the update, chatter for an hour/play a game/watch a movie, eject the CD, say goodbye and leave. No fiddling with PCs, no constant clicking with a mouse, no finding out it's done nothing for the last hour, no ignoring my friends. Of course, there will be awkward PCs, but these should be in the minority.
Thus I need an update file, rolled up from the last service pack, including all existing updates. I want this made available on microsoft.com as a single ISO/package. I want it to run to completion on the target machine from a single wizard with as little intervention from me as possible. Files must be available for all versions of Windows and Office.
My personal time is valuable. If MS want me to go around doing their job, they have to make it easy. But if they could, it would begin to see its problems reduce. Certainly I would be more inclined to help people out, and I guess from this story I'm the sort of chap MS wants to engage in this process.
3. Ian Savell
Why not stack free update CDs at the supermarket checkout?
It works for freeserve and AOL. Also I assume every PC mag out this month will have the update, won't it?
I doubt many home users would consider an 80Mb download, I'm not keen on doing it over broadband let alone dialup!
4. Mat Cashen
Why can't microsoft make these patches available on magazine cover disks? This surely would be the easiest way of getting mass coverage?
5. anonymous
We had problems with our Customers not having SP1. Easy solution was to put it on CD and despatch to our users. But Microsoft won't allow us because of Copyright!! So we can only advise users to download over modem (which they Won't). WOuld be easier if MS was not sole distributer of SP's
6. Paul Tansom
A WUG or a MUG? Are Microsoft looking at starting up a set of Windows User Groups or to cover all their products perhaps Microsoft User Groups (personally I like the second acronym best!).
This sounds very much like an attempt to build the sort of support available to Linux for many years with LUGs. Is this Microsoft playing catchup again?
It seems odd that a company with dominance on the desktop should always be playing catch up. Thankfully by using Linux on my own desktop I can work faster and be more productive so I can fix other peoples Windows problems, but I do wish they would bring Internet Explorer kicking and screaming into the 21st century.