Dear Microsoft, Suck it.

In case you haven't heard, DST is the new Y2K. That is, the hysteria once owed to the Y2K bug is now circling around the Daylight Savings Time bug.

You see, this year our esteemed government has decided to change the daylight savings dates around a bit. Of course, the typical PC with the typical operating system wasn't invited to that meeting and knows nothing about that decision or the impending collapse of civilization that will come from it.

In a mad rush to save us all from the inadequacies of their own products, Microsoft has released some patches to head off this calamity at the last minute. Swell, right? They only knew about it since August 2005. It's not like we server wonkies have anything else to do, right?

Well, they're only releasing patches for the newer OS's. That's right. Bastards. Oh, because no one in their right mind would still be running Windows 2000, right? That is so, like, old and stuff.

Well, I have news for you Microsoft. Your track record of stable OS releases is less than stellar. Hence, many companies have taken the wait and see approach so that they don't have to devote copious resources to keeping their environments running. So even though they're not on the most fashionable release of Windows, their stuff works and they get to do a little business on the side to keep the lights on. The point is that there are alot of legacy servers out there that are humming right along.

But that's not okay by you is it? You can't get any license revenue if folks don't constantly have to upgrade their stuff. So instead you publish a knowledge base article that outlines the slew of registry updates that have to be made just to get your stuff to work like it's supposed to. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914387/en-us).

In a situation such as this, Microsoft should step up and own the fix for their products, legacy or no. It's naive to think that everyone has moved on to Windows 2003 when 2000 is still a viable solution for many companies. Based on the scripts for updating Win2k that are listed on the above site, it would take slightly more than a gorilla to compile those into an MSI or MSP.

I wish I could run a company where the business model was, "screw the customers". It would sure make things alot simpler around here.