windows

I just received word from Gunter Born that Microsoft has pulled three of its Outlook patches:

• KB 4011042 – July 5, 2017, update for Outlook 2010
• KB 3191849 – June 27, 2017, update for Outlook 2013
• KB 3213654 – June 30, 2017, update for Outlook 2016

As I mentioned last week, Microsoft still hasn’t fixed any of the Office 2007 bugs it introduced in the June security patches.

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The headline — “HMS Queen Elizabeth is ‘running outdated Windows XP’, raising cyber attack fears” — was startling, but wrong. The United Kingdom’s newest aircraft carrier wasn’t running Windows XP. But some of the contractors that built the warship were.

The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, has been purchasing Windows XP support, at least through this year, so odds are our military still has XP systems running to this very day.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, Microsoft has had a tough time with patches this year. From a total lack of patches in February (except for a late IE patch), to yanked and reissued botched patches that followed, to a jumble of problems with Windows and Office patches — including seven admitted bugs in last month’s Office patches — Microsoft has proved itself adept at Jack-in-the-box patching. You don’t have to join the legions of unpaid patch beta testers.

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On Patch Wednesday of this week, Microsoft said it released 14 non-security Office updates, covering such fascinating topics as improved Dutch translations in Word 2013, Danish translations in Access, and Finnish and Swedish translations in Excel. Typical first Tuesday stuff.

Microsoft neglected to mention that it also shipped a fix for the bugs introduced by last month’s patches to Outlook 2010. Dubbed KB 4011042, the neglected fix appears to be a non-security patch that fixes bugs created by a security patch — a red flag for many advanced patchers.

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For over 20 years, Microsoft stomped on its competitors and then defended itself against the resulting antitrust lawsuits. But with desktop Windows waning in importance and its desktop software rivals largely gone, Microsoft seemed to have turned a new leaf. Or had it?

In the one software sphere left where it still has rivals — antivirus and security software — Microsoft is up to its old anti-competitive tricks. Late last year, Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the eponymous antivirus company, said, “When you upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft automatically and without any warning deactivates all ‘incompatible’ security software and in its place installs… you guessed it — its own Defender antivirus. But what did it expect when independent developers were given all of one week before the release of the new version of the OS to make their software compatible?”

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