"We Say So" corporation

I used to watch a rather funny show on ABC TV named “Dinosaurs” about your typical Jurassic period nuclear family, with large dinosaurs having similar problems to modern day humans. It was quite funny. The father dinosaur worked for “We Say So” corporation. Should give you an idea of what they did, and how they did it. You didn’t have a choice. You had to do what they wanted. The following is a bit of venting.

Here is the scoop. I am building a VMWare virtual machine with a windows 2k client. We retired a w2k machine about 2 years ago, and the license pretty much sat there as I bought a copy of XP for the replacement unit. The machine is out there pushing up the silicon equivalent of daisies, the hard disk wiped. Fired up the VMware session, loaded Win2k. As with all windows systems, you now have a mad scramble to patch it before the first nastyness hits. You don’t have a choice. Ok, you do, but the downside to not patching windows systems is huge. Even emulated ones. So there I am trying furiously to update Win2k using windows update. Only 31 critical updates. Some of which cannot be installed together (brilliant idea there … yeah… really). And off we go. Pulls down SP4, reboot. Pull down the next one, reboot. Now on to the rest … except…. The install window doesn’t work in IE4 or whatever this is native in there. You cannot use it to pull down more updates. Ok, go to the IE download page, and lets pull down the latest. You know IE7. One minor problem. IE7 doesn’t work with Win2k. Ok. Lets find IE6. Trying. Looking. The formatting is so completely broken. I give up. I browse to mozilla.org, pull down Firefox 2.0.0.1, install it, Google search for IE6 install, find it, pull down IE6setup.exe and I am now in the middle of installing this. “We say so” corporation. If any MSFTers out there are reading this, do you think it was a good idea to force me to go to two competitors products, just to be able to find the file I needed to update the client OS update utility to the point where I could install the rest of the mandatory security patches? C’mon folks, this was not very good. Ok, you might reasonably ask, why not install Vista? After all it is the latest and greatest windows? Two reasons: First, this is an older laptop with a 2 GHz processor and only a gigabyte of ram, and more importantly, Second: this is a virtualized (VMWare) session. Vista’s license explicitly prohibits such things last I have read/heard. Which means people like me, and companies like mine, who need to set up demo systems, using virtualized clients, are going to be scrambling for XP media and licenses (I had no unused licenses, and it was Win2k or WinNT 4.0 which were sitting here unused and uninstalled) or win2k media and licenses. “We say so”. So fitting. Work the way we say, not the way you need to. This is for a demo at a conference I am going to next week. Drive the demo from the VM, make it look like an end users desktop. Show the stuff running really nicely.