Risk-Averseness in IT

In a recent meeting with IT management where W2K8 came up (which has been happening a lot with me around RODC and NAP), the recurring phrase arose of "Nobody ever deploys a new MS operating system until Service Pack 1." 

And it occured to me, is this actually the norm in businesses anymore?  I used to say exactly the same thing, but that was way the heck back in the NT4/2000 days where not only did you not deploy before SP1, you also never trusted an even-numbered Service Pack. (Let's talk about managing a Lotus Notes shop when NT4 SP6 hit the streets and hopelessly b0rked the TCP/IP stack for a pile of non-MS applications, including Notes/Domino.)

XP?  Deployed it to my entire office before SP1.  2003?  Was running it in production before it even RTM'ed.  Tried to make it blue-screen during RC1 and RC2 and couldn't manage to do so.

Is the rest of the world still not deploying en masse before SP1, and I've just become more of a risk-taker?¹  Or are organizations going to be more willing to take a punt on 2008 without waiting a year for it to prove as stable as a lot of us already know it to be.  I'm certainly hoping it's the latter, as a lot of organizations needed things like RODC and NAP yesterday, and it would be a shame to be prevented from moving forward because of a mindset that was a good rule of thumb 8 years ago.

[1] Not a word out of you, BP, you don't count for the purposes of an "early adopter" headcount.  :-)

Update on Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 11:01AM by Laura E. Hunter

Although it occurs to me, given all the grief surrounding the Scalable Network Pack features that got turned on by 2K3 SP2 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912222) ...maybe we're not totally free of the "Never trust an even-numbered service pack" wives' tale yet.

Comments

[Brad Turner]

I prefer to think of those days as "Pre-MVP". I think you have much more of an involved community and a more thorough beta process nowadays. Most of the old "pre-SP1" risks are weeded out early on because of this. Plus, I'd like to think that even Microsoft learns from their mistakes.