
Why Microsoft really patched XP - drzaiusapelord
http://nothingjustworks.com/why-microsoft-really-patched-xp/
======
chasing
"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about
reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE."

Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be
overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart
from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I
think), I suspect that more people came into programming through web
development between 1995 and 2005 than via any other path -- and for that
decade IE was basically a big advertisement for the worst sides of Microsoft
during those years -- the side that steamrolled competition with their lower-
quality software, the side that tried to destroy open source and open
standards, the side that attracted customers by manipulation and force.

~~~
nivla
I wouldn't go as far back as 1995. I remember using Netscape those days and IE
was considered the "hip & modern browser" just like we do now for Chrome. It
was the best viewed in IE days and since there were no real standards or
committee back then, everyone wrote their own feature set including MS. It did
sure give us the annoying <blink> and <marquee> tags but remember it also gave
us Ajax. The shit only really blew when Firefox came into scene with a faster,
secure and more progressive browser than IE.

Although, I personally feel if firefox doesn't catchup with the webkit
browsers, we will soon be taking a full circle.

~~~
twistedpair
Oh, but let's not forget page transition animations introduced by IE. Thank
God those died a rapid death.

The other thing that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing
$70 per copy. Remember... people used to pay for browsers.

~~~
MichaelApproved
> that killed NetScape Communicator is that it had been costing $70 per copy.

It didn't kill Netscape to charge per copy, that's how software works. People
need to earn money for their work creating software.

What killed Netscape was Microsoft taking advantage of its monopoly by pushing
itself into a new market with free software. Microsoft didn't need to earn
money _directly_ from the browser, so they could afford to give it away for
free and take a loss.

~~~
WettowelReactor
While the monopoly control provided a simplified avenue for distribution the
free price tag alone cannot be held to blame. By that analogy any free, open
source product can push its way into a new market and kill the paid for
competition which is clearly not the case.

------
benjaminpv
>I wonder why these protections aren’t enabled by default.

Because bugs exposed by a change in Windows are used to denigrate Windows, not
the developer of the buggy app[1].

[1]:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481.aspx)

~~~
mikeash
Unfortunately, this sort of thing seems to snowball. MS bends over backwards
to preserve backwards compatibility, so third-party vendors basically have
free reign to abuse the OS, requiring MS to bend over backwards even more to
accommodate them, and on and on.

Apple, for example, had much less of a problem with this even before the days
of the App Store and the accompanying restrictions, because developers largely
knew that if they depended on undocumented behavior there was a good chance
that their app would break and Apple wouldn't fix it for them.

~~~
ntakasaki
The other side is that Apple is not preferred in many corporate shops exactly
because of that.

~~~
bunderbunder
And how. My company relies on a lot of in-house software that was built
against Microsoft technologies from the 1990s, and are still supported. We
have plenty of resources; we could port/rewrite them if we needed to. But that
isn't cheap, and I imagine we've saved a _lot_ of money over the years thanks
to Microsoft's devotion to backward-compatibility on Windows. Not just
development cost, but cost related to software defects we have not created
because we've been able to leave already-working software in place.

(Web applications that rely on ActiveX, on the other hand. . .)

------
ezreal420
It's actually much simpler than you think. Microsoft have some big customers
that pay them to maintain XP. Microsoft like making money, so they maintain XP
for them. If these patches make it to general availability is up to Microsoft
however, and it looks like they are still doing that.

~~~
aninteger
Big customers like Target that would prefer to run their POS machines on
Windows XP. So sad..

~~~
ConceptJunkie
It's not sad at all when XP does the job and it would cost ridiculous amounts
of money to update for no benefit. Now, waiting until the product fell out of
support was a mistake, but Microsoft failed to produce a compelling upgrade
for XP, period. Even Windows 7, which people generally like, doesn't run on
the same hardware as well as XP if that hardware is older, which XP computers
are going to be. And Windows 8? Aside from whatever bug fixes or improvements
to the kernel might be involved, there is not one thing in Windows 8 that does
not exist solely to serve Microsoft's interests, regardless of what customers
want.

You can't blame MS when the customers don't see the value in upgrading,
because from their point of view, there wasn't one. Now that XP has been
sunsetted, everyone is worried, and there are a lot of companies that were
very foolish in not moving to a viable and supported solution... except that
in some cases, there literally isn't one.

There's a tremendous amount of legacy software out there that does the job and
doesn't need a newer OS. A few years ago, one of my kids had use a portable
brain wave monitor for a couple days, and was issued a device that he would be
hooked up to, and guess what? It ran Windows 2000. I wasn't surprised at all.
Windows 2000, as an OS, was one of the most solid releases Microsoft ever had
(not necessarily the userland stuff, some of which was horrible, but the OS
itself was fine).

By the way, the monitor found that everything was normal, my kid's just weird.
;-)

I would imagine those devices are probably still in use, and why not? Windows
2000 was a perfectly solid OS and was very secure on a non-networked device.
XP didn't suddenly become not a good OS, Microsoft just pulled the plug
without offering a good option for people with old hardware that didn't want
to (or couldn't afford to) replace it.

~~~
tmzt
Part of "doing the job" is keeping customer data secure, and the company's
reputation -- and the CEO's job -- intact.

~~~
wnevets
was target's data breach caused by an xp bug?

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davidgerard
Site is being hammered. Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xhJHpCh...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xhJHpChHozkJ:nothingjustworks.com/why-
microsoft-really-patched-xp/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=ubuntu)

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fragmede
> Can you imagine the conventional wisdom for IE being, “Don’t use it, ever.

That _is_ accepted conventional wisdom among most techies I know.

~~~
joesmo
Yup. No need to imagine at all.

------
tormeh
Just a nitpick: What features were lost in the transition from the start menu
to the start screen? The start menu closes if it loses focus anyway, so you
can't do other stuff with it open. Arguably, the start menu not being full-
screen is a bug. I suspect this is just a case of people not liking change, no
matter how trivial.

Well, it did lose the off button, but other than that I can't come up with
anything.

~~~
the_hangman
> Arguably, the start menu not being full-screen is a bug.

A bug introduced in Windows 95 that they waited until 2013 to patch? I think
after a certain number of years it might have moved from a bug to a feature.

For me, the problem with the new start screen is exactly what you describe.
I'm fairly scatterbrained. When I'm going to open a program, file, etc., it's
usually because of something else I have open, like an email with a request
from a co-worker. When the start screen takes up the whole screen, I get
distracted from the reason I opened it in the first place and have to go back
to my email before I remember. I know that it's my problem, not Microsoft's,
but at least having the choice between overlay or full screen would be nice.

~~~
jackvalentine
I consider the context-switching of the huge fullscreen start menu the same as
the "forget why you entered a room when you walk through a door" phenomenom.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-
throug...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-
doorway-makes-you-forget/)

------
Piskvorrr
Interesting idea, yet it doesn't quite line up with the facts, IMNSHO: IE on
XP only goes up to 8, yet this CVE goes up to 11, and it's what, two weeks
old? [http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/emerging-threat-
micros...](http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/emerging-threat-microsoft-
internet-explorer-zero-day-cve-2014-1776-remote-code-execution-vulne) \- and
guess what, the recommendation is "Do not use IE, at all, not even the new
versions." Both the browser and its brand are broken beyond any repair.

~~~
jevinskie
"Do not use IE _until a patch is released_ " is what it really said. The
browser has been steadily improving its standards compliance with each new
version. Yes, many people are using alternative browsers nowadays but I don't
think that means IE is hopeless.

~~~
Piskvorrr
"Until a patch is released - sometime, eventually, hopefully: no clear date is
given, and the track record says this same situation will repeat within six
months."

------
kyberias
There's this particular style of writing blog articles that assumes that the
reader knows all about the context of the topic (here: Microsoft has patched
something, have they?) and the relevance to something (what, really?). It's a
5 minute brain dump for the author himself.

~~~
dublinben
That's pretty much a pure example of what a blog entry originally was. Since
the author is directly responding to an earlier story, he can assume that the
reader is familiar with the context. Especially within the HN community, this
is a reasonably accurate assumption. This isn't an article for Time magazine
or CNN.

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BlakePetersen
Looks like their WP DB borked...

~~~
coldcode
#1 on HN on Saturday was about 150/min sustained. That's not even 3 per
second. What in WP makes this an issue, or is it just running WP on a shared
instance on a wimpy server. Or is it some config in WP that you need to
change?

~~~
mnw21cam
Some web sites are limited by a fairly paltry network usage limit, not by
throughput of the server. I don't think you can ever assume that a privately-
held domain can cope with unaccustomed traffic, even if it is only 3 per
second. Seems to be responding well now, anyway.

------
unistdh
Off topic - but I can't decide if I love or hate the theme used on this site..

~~~
buckbova
[http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/retro-mac-
os/](http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/retro-mac-os/)

It's a fun theme for a personal site. I see the theme reference was removed
from the site though.

------
geekster
The irritating thing is: While IE is the most veulnerable, the most slowest
and the clunkiest internet browser in the universe, it still manages to be the
most used browser.

~~~
ema
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_usage_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_usage_share)
says chrome overtook IE already 2 years ago.

~~~
geekster
Ahh, my bad! But I think it overtook in 2013, cause many websites claim that.
Cheers!

