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Will the scenario involving the cancellation of the Windows XP Service Pack 3 become reality? The XP community is increasingly leaning toward this possibility. In the context in which Microsoft has pushed back the release of XP SP3 to the first half of 2008, the launching of the operating system's upgrade seems improbable. “The fear is that Service Pack 3 will just get killed off,” said Jeff Centimano, an IT consultant with Levi, Ray & Shoup. “That's exactly how it worked out for Windows 2000.”
And indeed there is a precedent. Service Pack 5 for Windows 2000 Server was scrapped by Microsoft back in 2004 and replaced with a conglomerate of security updates for the operating system. With the current XP service pack set for expiration in early 2009, and with Windows Vista on the market, Microsoft might just ax Service Pack 3 altogether.
It is interesting to correlate the evolution of the Windows XP SP3 delays with the evolution of Windows Vista. The very last stage involves further delaying the XP
update from the end of 2007 all the way back to the first half of 2008.
Currently, Windows XP is ubiquitous to say the least, running on an estimated 86.80% of the world's PCs in 2006. But it is also associated with countless vulnerabilities and an extensive piracy phenomenon. It is possible that Microsoft feels the need to dispense an operating system inferior to Vista and that will become obsolete in the forthcoming period, just to make room for a privileged Windows Vista.
“A service pack has been quality assurance-tested with all of the hot fixes together as one installation package,” said Ethan Allen, a quality assurance lead with a Seattle-based technology company. “If you were to take 500 hot fixes and install them one by one, eventually you might run into problems because they weren't all QA'd [quality assurance tested] as one package.”
“It absolutely could happen. Microsoft is under no obligation to produce any service packs, ever,” stated Microsoft Analyst Michael Cherry acknowledging the possibility of a SP3 cancellation. “They feel that because these fixes are available through the auto-update that there's less need to create a service pack. The thing that I don't understand is on one hand Microsoft seems to promote the concept that customers want predictable release cycles for operating systems, yet Microsoft also seems to say that customers don't care how random the release of a service pack is.”
Izvor : http://win.softpedia.com/ 
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