What else happened yesterday?

Yesterday, a few hours before RTM, my blog posting was almost ready, I realized that this blog entry, being posted a few hours before RTM of SP1, had the potenial of becoming 'influencial' to my career. Well, at least I decided not to blog.

Only to find out now, blogging after the fact it dull and boring.

SP1 has been released to manufacturing: https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-30winservsp1pr.asp

Deep in the bowels of above announcement our PR team hid the core message: “Also today, Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition were released to manufacturing and will be available through various partners in late April. ”

My dear lord! This is it. This is the key. We’ve done it. It is out. The product teams have done their great magic. And they delivered in time! If I only had written about it yesterday and just took the risk.

Granted SP1 by itself is extremely important already. But let’s face it; eventually it is just a service pack. But that sentence ("Also today, ... "), jikes, talks about the real thing. SP1 has 2 major aspects; one is the service pack itself with all the important corrections and security improvement and two, the support of AMD64 and Intel EM64T platforms on workstation and server.

Why we shy? What do we fear? It is not a bad thing to support our future mainstream hardware architecture. Are we ashamed of supporting 64-bit also on non-Itanium platforms?

I guess none of it is right. It must have something to do with marketing and I do not know squat about that.

What counts: By end of April you and I can buy the real stuff. Windows for x64 platforms from XP Pro to Datacenter Edition. Let the (64-bit Windows) future begin. Sigh!