Windows XP SP3 suffers uncertain future

Microsoft’s long journey getting Vista out the door has left more than one body by the roadside. Remember the WinFS file system? How about the Next Generation Secure Computing Base? Now the operating system’s delays may be causing ripple effects in other products.

Microsoft last week said that it is pushing back the next major service pack for Windows XP until the first half of 2008. The news came just ahead of reports that Vista’s RTM (release to manufacturers) is being pushed back once again, from late October to early November, complicating matters for PC makers.

SP3 is a collection of security fixes and OS updates that was originally slated for 2006. In January, Microsoft said it was pushing that date back to the second half of 2007. Last week, the date slipped further to a “preliminary” date sometime in the first half of 2008.

The latest delay has some wondering whether the upgrade will ever see the light of day.

“The fear is Service Pack 3 will just get killed off,” said Jeff Centimano, an IT consultant at Levi, Ray & Shoup.

Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry agreed that Microsoft may very well decide to drop XP Service Pack 3. “It absolutely could happen. Microsoft is under no obligation to produce any service packs, ever,” he said. “They feel that because these fixes are available through the auto-update that there’s less need to create a service pack.”

However, getting Vista out the door is a must, and it appears Microsoft was waylaid in that effort by a nasty bug that appeared during quality-control checks and wiped out Windows XP systems during upgrade, according to Ethan Allen, a quality-assurance lead who oversees TheHotFix.net, a Web site that tracks Vista development. While Microsoft fixed the bug, the delay of almost one week will push Vista RTM to Nov. 8 and will jeopardize the enterprise release of Vista later that month.