Doug's Mailbag: Patching and Cloud Thoughts

One reader gives his opinion on how Microsoft is doing with its monthly patch rollout:

Microsoft has vastly improved its patches over the past decade. It does a pretty decent job over all. However, I'm terribly annoyed/disturbed that it has so many patches to release in the first place. Has Microsoft never heard of quality control? Does it not understand the type of critical data that exists on their platform (from private health information, to banking, all the way to national security)?

If you purchased a car and there were 300 to 400 recalls, would you accept that? If you had a TV that required 300 to 400 "patches" to correct various issues with the it, would you accept that? It makes me want to scream that Microsoft can't calm down and take the time for a little QC for its products instead of rushing them out the door as fast as possible -- in all of its vulnerable 'glory.'

For anyone who wants to defend this by citing the tired excuse of 'millions of lines of code,' I would submit that Microsoft should either scale it back, or hire enough people to thoroughly examine those millions of lines to be stable and secure. Either one is fine with me -- but Microsoft does neither, and I feel that is unacceptable.
-Todd

Here's an IT veteran's take on the cloud:

I am a 50-year-old IT professional that successfully survived a downsized 23-year corporate career by first transitioning to private consulting and then joining a large regional consulting firm.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner in ERP and Server spaces, my company and I have been watching Microsoft's Cloud push develop over the past three years. Microsoft's direction has been quietly evident the past few years and will, IMO, reach in-your-face volume when it comfortably feels it has let enough water under the bridge for it to be safe to sell against its future wave of products.

Some of that is happening already. We are not only a Microsoft ERP VAR but also have a very successful CRM practice. A customer copied me on an e-mail from their Microsoft Redmond representative that was soliciting CRM online -- a conversation we would have otherwise been unaware of. So yes – the cloud already has an impact to our business.

The 50-person regional consulting firm I work for is getting steady work with small- to medium-sized business virtualizing 2003 implementations of server, e-mail, and application solutions. The conversations are simple, direct and rarely go awry. I expect that within the next five years the cloud will be viable enough that our opportunity will have shifted from virtualization to cloud integration.

As a result, I've begun shifting my 'free-time' from working with physical solutions to working with our development team where we are integrating Agile processes into our .NET C# solutions. I just had a 'where do you want to focus your career' conversation with our Senior Partner this morning. I had to put my money where my mouth is and say 'not infrastructure.' We begin mapping out a career path after a break in Spring.
-Eric

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Posted by Doug Barney on 02/27/2012 at 1:19 PM