Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Nothing is ever easy at Microsoft. They are still dawdling over the Windows XP Service Pack Three release to consumers, although they did release XP SP3 to corporate users last week, as predicted by this column (and many others). The XP build offered to MSDN and Technet support subscribers is an ISO build that IT personnel use to image the operating system onto a formatted hard disk.

Microsoft says that they are holding back the release of XP3 to the general public because of problems in their Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), Microsoft’s widely used retail point-of-sale system. The exact problems with the RMS system have not been announced, but the Redmond software giant has said that the RMS fix would be delivered as a special hotfix for those systems only. 

The end-result is that there is no immediate XP SP3 for the rest of us. Still, the corporate users, many of whom have not yet gone to Vista, are the ones that need this service pack most desperately and in the greatest numbers. Most consumers, especially those who have purchased a new computer in the last couple of years, were given little choice but to buy Vista, though it was possible (but difficult) to get a new PC with XP loaded. The general-public holdouts (and there are a lot of holdouts) that recognized Vista as the debacle it is and have stayed with XP are a thorn in Microsoft’s side, and you will notice that they are the ones still waiting for the service pack.