Ballmer: "I'm going to have a real issue..."
Posted on Jul 16, 2004 at 01:48 PM by John Foley
I cringed when director of Windows Server marketing Steve Andersen told me at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference this week that Windows Update Services was being delayed again. Not only did Steve Ballmer make a big deal about Microsoft’s plans for improved patch management at last year’s WPC, but Bill Gates did the same a few months later in an interview with me. It doesn’t reflect well on either of the company’s top two executives when the product teams miss their ship dates—not just once, but twice—on such a key deliverable. Just read the following quote from Ballmer’s 2003 keynote on what was then called Software Updates Services 2.0:
“I guarantee you that if I come back to this conference, which I will -- when I am back at this conference next year, I am going to ask people whether they've deployed Software Update Services 2.0. And if as few hands go up as went up today, I'm going to have a real issue with our product development people or with our marketing people, because, believe me, this is targeted at one of the key pain points that you and our customers have identified.”
But there was no reason for Steve Ballmer to ask partners that question at this year's conference in Toronto because it would have been irrelevant, given how far behind schedule the product has fallen. Originally planned for the first half of this year, Software Update Services 2.0, later renamed Windows Update Services, got pushed into the second half -- and now it’s slated for the first half of 2005. It might be tempting to brush off the significance of the delay because WUS is mainly a mid-market product (big companies use System Management Server for patching), but there’s also this to consider: The underlying patch technology within WUS is intended to eventually replace SMS’s patch-management engine. Microsoft’s long-term goal of unifying its patch-management infrastructure has also suffered a set back.
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