DST Patch. $4000.

Siji · Post by **Siji** » March 1, 2007, 2:45 pm

Microsoft to charge for Daylight Saving hotfixes for older products

March 11, the new date on which Daylight Saving Time (DST) will take effect in the U.S. and a growing number of other countries, is fast approaching. And Microsoft is working overtime to get the message out that users need to patch a bunch of their Microsoft products, from Exchange Server, to Windows Mobile, in order to head off date-change headaches.

There's one bit of DST fine print that Microsoft isn't sharing quite so readily, however. (I discovered it by wading through a slide deck that Microsoft is providing to analysts to get them up-to-speed on the company's DST guidance.)

Page 20 of the deck mentions that Microsoft has decided, due to the number of customers and products affected by the DST 2007 changes, to "amend the regular Extended Hotfix support program." If you need to patch older Microsoft products that already have moved from "Mainstream" to "Extended" support phase, Microsoft will give you a chance to buy the hotfixes you need — for $4,000.

Microsoft explains:

"For products that have entered into the Extended Support phase, Microsoft will provide customers with the opportunity to purchase the DST 20007 hotfix at a reduced price of Four Thousand Dollars (US $4,000). Customers will only be charged a single fee of $4,000 to obtain all hotfixes, for products in Extended Support phase, needed to update their systems for DST 2007.

"For customers who have previously purchased DST 2007 hotfixes for products in Extended Support, Microsoft will reimburse the difference to them under the new pricing category."

A Microsoft spokesman said that the $4,000 price represents a substantial discount.

"Originally, all the out-of-support patches were $40,000 each. However, we realized this hardship and lowered the price to $4,000 for ALL THE DST PATCHES for our customers best interest. The $4,000 is to just cover costs," he said.

Windows Server 2000, Exchange Server 2000, Outlook 2000 and a number of other Microsoft products are currently in the Extended Support phase. The full list of Microsoft products affected by DST 2007 changes is here.

And why can't they just put it up for download? I mean, if they've written the patch then that's all they need to do. Four thousand dollars? Are you kidding me?

Post by **Sylvus** » March 1, 2007, 3:00 pm

Shrug. We have old products that ran on DOS or different versions of Windows that we no longer support. I'd guess that the $4000 price tag is an effort to get people to upgrade to newer versions. Or to make back the money it costs for them to keep programmers around to work on a product that no one else will be buying ever again.

Makes sense to me, they're there to make money. Releasing free patches for antiquated programs that bring them no income does not fit that philosophy.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » March 1, 2007, 3:55 pm

It's still cheaper than buying all new equipment and software.
That's the price of doing business.

We're talking about patches here that are probably for Windows NT and Exchange 5.5 since Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 are still most likely in regular support phace.

This avenue will still be much cheaper for people than upgrading all their stuff.

Truant · Post by **Truant** » March 1, 2007, 5:46 pm

Of course, that begs the argument. Why do we still have fucking DST in the first place?

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » March 1, 2007, 6:14 pm

They say it helps conserve energy. Personally I think it's lame and it should just be the same all year round.

But it was working fine as it was. Then George Bush had to screw it up. Now I don't know when to flip my mattress!

Siji · Post by **Siji** » March 1, 2007, 11:12 pm

Animalor wrote:We're talking about patches here that are probably for Windows NT and Exchange 5.5 since Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 are still most likely in regular support phace.

This avenue will still be much cheaper for people than upgrading all their stuff.

Unless I'm reading the article incorrectly, All the 2000 products are extended service - which is what the cost applies to. Which is why I find this to be such a big issue. The amount of companies with large install bases of 2000 products is extensive I would guess. For NT 4.x and DOS stuff or WFW or whatever, yeah, nobody is writing for that and not much runs on them anymore anyway. But nearly everything still runs on Win2k. And we're also talking about a VERY minor patch. It's not like they've got to rewrite mega chunks of code to deal with this. And is time management from Win2k to WinXP products so vastly different that it wouldn't be a few lines of code at best difference between the two?

Sabek · Post by **Sabek** » March 2, 2007, 12:12 am

Put your shit on GMT like it should be and the DST patching is a non-issue.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 2, 2007, 1:35 am

Siji wrote:
Animalor wrote:We're talking about patches here that are probably for Windows NT and Exchange 5.5 since Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 are still most likely in regular support phace.

This avenue will still be much cheaper for people than upgrading all their stuff.
Unless I'm reading the article incorrectly, All the 2000 products are extended service - which is what the cost applies to. Which is why I find this to be such a big issue. The amount of companies with large install bases of 2000 products is extensive I would guess. For NT 4.x and DOS stuff or WFW or whatever, yeah, nobody is writing for that and not much runs on them anymore anyway. But nearly everything still runs on Win2k. And we're also talking about a VERY minor patch. It's not like they've got to rewrite mega chunks of code to deal with this. And is time management from Win2k to WinXP products so vastly different that it wouldn't be a few lines of code at best difference between the two?

It's not a massive patch. However there is more to it than you make out; e.g. appointments entered already for the period in question have to be adjusted by the server so that they appear at the right time in the clients, and they have to be adjusted in some way such that repeated attempts to patch if there's a problem means they don't get moved twice, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Plus a good few man hours of testing.

That said, they publish their support terms *before* they sell this shit. If you choose to ignore their schedules at purchase and/or refuse to recognise that IT has significant on-going costs and budget nothing for maintenance/replacement over the published lifecycle, I don't have much sympathy for you having a couple weeks where you have to double check Outlook Calander appointments. ~ Which is all not patching means (or patching for that matter)

Oh, but there's so many people affected etc, etc. Sure, but what industry are you in that you will happily sell a product for $1000 (or $100,000) with no trail income, and then provide patch support for it indefinitely? Where's the economics in that? Where's the "line" that you would be comfortable with, and would you be happy if they upped the price by 10x to fund the infinite support you want?

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » March 2, 2007, 1:36 am

I work at a rather large (ie slow moving) company and very little of the infrastructure, if any at all, is still running Windows 2000. If the businesses were smart they would have worked and implemented a plan to move off declining technology before this became an issue.

Personally I prefer to continue blaming Bush.

Siji · Post by **Siji** » March 2, 2007, 3:26 am

I also work for a fairly large corporation and know first hand how difficult it is to get money to move. (e.g. I've been working on a software/license purchase of "only" 300k for almost a year now) We're probably across the board 2-3 versions behind on our main major applications. It's not just a matter of upgrading a couple hundred instances. You're talking thousands, and you're talking applications that affect customers with whom we have contracts and SLAs, billing, etc. New versions of applications (especially major versions) not only have to endure lots of compatibility testing before being finally implemented, but there has to be a true justifiable reason to justify the capital expense of these purchases (read: improved productivity, cost savings, etc)

You're also, again, referring to major support when the article and myself are referring to something minor that's already being written for the other 'current' OS versions. If this were about making old OSs work on say, DirectX 10 then you would have a point. This isn't a new feature request, it's an across the board patch. Certainly not worth $4k, when as you said, it could simply be ignored if necessary.

As for providing patch support indefinitely? Linux.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 2, 2007, 4:38 am

Siji wrote: As for providing patch support indefinitely? Linux.

Hehehe... Linux has a more agressive upgrade requirement than Windows, unless you're happy compiling all your applications from source, statically linked.

Plus, they're quite happy to break compatibility between versions at will; MySQL 4.0, 4.1, 5.0 for example are all incompatible between each other if you use certain features in your product, and that's without even having stored proceedures...

And again, while this patch might not require a massive re-engineering effort to go from NT 5.1 to NT 5.0, the effort required is still > nil, which is their committment to an OS that went EOL a long time ago.

Of course... they didn't originally set the cost to $40K to cover costs... ^^

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » March 2, 2007, 2:21 pm

I was talking the OS level and not really about applications but I guess it doesn't matter much. If a company doesn't want to spend the money then that's really their decision and, in this case, they end up having to pay for patches. Staying somewhat current isn't cheap and it does take time but at least you're able to receive vendor support and patches. A lot of companies would simply say "Sorry. We can't help you because we no longer support that version/"

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 2, 2007, 9:02 pm

Aslanna wrote:I was talking the OS level and not really about applications but I guess it doesn't matter much. If a company doesn't want to spend the money then that's really their decision and, in this case, they end up having to pay for patches. Staying somewhat current isn't cheap and it does take time but at least you're able to receive vendor support and patches. A lot of companies would simply say "Sorry. We can't help you because we no longer support that version/"

Not only that, but the guy that wrote the core of it is dead, we lost the source code, and your mother's a whore.

Kelshara · Post by **Kelshara** » March 3, 2007, 1:44 am

Microsoft and their policy to support software lately has pissed me off bigtime. In particular with what Vista supports. Fucking jackasses.

noel · Post by **noel** » March 3, 2007, 11:07 pm

I don't see this as a major issue. It's 7 years since Win 2k was released. MS themselves has workarounds and registry edits available for smaller organizations... for the larger ones, $4k is a small price to pay for MS continuing to provide support for a legacy product. 7 years in technology is about 3 lifetimes.

Kelshara · Post by **Kelshara** » March 5, 2007, 11:46 am

Except that MS states they have a 10 year product support

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » March 5, 2007, 12:55 pm

Kelshara wrote:Except that MS states they have a 10 year product support

Isn't that only when the extended support is purchased?

noel · Post by **noel** » March 5, 2007, 1:12 pm

Kelshara wrote:Except that MS states they have a 10 year product support

Not only is that not true, but MS puts out both digital and paper to paying customers when the support is coming to an end.

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » March 5, 2007, 1:24 pm

noel wrote:
Kelshara wrote:Except that MS states they have a 10 year product support
Not only is that not true, but MS puts out both digital and paper to paying customers when the support is coming to an end.

It's not entirely untrue though. They do offer 10 years of support, but the "extended" support is basically self-help online support.

http://support.microsoft.com/?LN=en-us& ... e&x=8&y=11

That link also shows that this type of support is available as Paid Support, and non-security hotfixes end (for free) after the Mainstream Support Phase.

noel · Post by **noel** » March 5, 2007, 1:27 pm

Right, but this is actually a software enhancement...

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » March 5, 2007, 1:34 pm

noel wrote:Right, but this is actually a software enhancement...

Which is still "product support." I'm not disagreeing with you. They do clearly state that they will support the product for 10 years in a particular way. This type of support is offered through paid support (buy the patch).

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » March 5, 2007, 1:40 pm

Regardless of if you pay for it or not this whole DST 2007 thing has been a huge pita.

Hopefully this will be the last time this happens.

Post by **Sylvus** » March 5, 2007, 1:45 pm

Animalor wrote:Regardless of if you pay for it or not this whole DST 2007 thing has been a huge pita.

I'm still wondering what my alarm clock is going to do. It "knows" when DST changes, but I'm pretty sure it was manufactured before congress passed that law. I think I'm probably screwed.

noel · Post by **noel** » March 5, 2007, 2:02 pm

Understood, Boog.

I guess my only points are:

Supporting a 7 year old software product after development cycle has been concluded without being paid is unprecedented.
Certainly MS could have gained some goodwill by providing the fix for free, but that's not really how a business works.
If people don't like it, they should move to Linux or the Mac OS.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 5, 2007, 2:09 pm

Sylvus wrote:
Animalor wrote:Regardless of if you pay for it or not this whole DST 2007 thing has been a huge pita.
I'm still wondering what my alarm clock is going to do. It "knows" when DST changes, but I'm pretty sure it was manufactured before congress passed that law. I think I'm probably screwed.

Can you change time zones on it? Arizona never changes for DST so when DST changes, a lot of the time there's no setting for AZ time on clocks and I have to switch my clock back and forth from PST and MST settings. Also, ROME will go from being televised at 10PM each Sunday to 9PM for people in AZ after the DST change. The TV schedule shifts an hour for AZ each DST change.

Windows has the AZ time setting so I don't have to worry about it...Microsoft is always looking out for everyone!

Boogahz · Post by **Boogahz** » March 5, 2007, 10:41 pm

THIS is tech support!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pyjRj3UMRM

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » March 7, 2007, 7:21 pm

if you add up all the hours people at my company spend fixing their fucking calendar requests it would total tens of thousands of dollars, so i dont think $4K is a bad deal

of course our company was too cheap to spring for it....they cap our email at 150MB....

that was pretty sweet....10 years ago

Kelshara · Post by **Kelshara** » March 8, 2007, 1:23 pm

noel wrote:Right, but this is actually a software enhancement...

Ohhh now THAT I disagree with. I would not consider this a software enhancement at all. Software change or update.. but not an enhancement.

And I am mostly grumpy about Vista. Assholes.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » March 12, 2007, 10:31 am

So I update our messaging environment for DST, I Update our BB Server for DST, I push out patches and for 3 days query for status of patch deployment of DST updates to our BB device fleet. All is good right?

WRONG!

My boss and his boss are using blackberry Pearls. (The only 2 in the enterprise to run those f'ing things). The server was telling me "Yeah, they're good. All their shit is already up to date."

*sigh* At least it was only 2 Blackberries that didn't get updates instead of 25.

Did I mention that my Boss's boss is the COO?

And that he forgot his BB at home this morning?

I had to draft an e-mail with instruction on how he can browse to http://www.blackberry.com/dst2007 from his unit and do the update himself since I won't be here starting tomorrow and for the rest of the week(I'm being sent on training for VMWare ESX 3!!! Yay).

Neost · Post by **Neost** » March 12, 2007, 12:12 pm

I had to update 600+ retail sites with content delivery equipment and quite a few IOS based devices and load-balancers.

Went off without a hitch. Cisco has possibly the best tech support in the known universe, imo. Even the guys you talk to that you have to go to email to understand tend to know what their shit.

Of course it also helps to be at a company that has a dedicated account team:)

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » March 12, 2007, 1:24 pm

I tried to call RIM last week on an unrelated issue and they were so swamped that they wern't accepting new calls and their IVR was hanging up on all new calls.

Needless to say I was pretty pissed off since we're paying for this support contract.

Neost · Post by **Neost** » March 12, 2007, 3:39 pm

glad i don't have to screw with out blackberry enterprise shit. They apparently have been having issues since the time change.

We also resell blackberry services (telco don't ya know) and i noticed they were having problems too. Not 100% sure its DST related on the reseller side but it is on the enterprise side.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » March 13, 2007, 11:25 pm

funny, the only thing NOT fucked up at Turner with respect to DST are the blackberries....

noel · Post by **noel** » March 14, 2007, 12:12 am

My wife has a Pearl and I have an 8700 and we both noticed that in our respective organizations the crackberries seemed to be a much more easy patch than the MS stuff (even with the $4k cost). I'd go so far as to say neither of us even noticed our BBs being patched.