Microsoft sets target date for Vista

Microsoft’s Chris Jones has posted on his blog a target date for the code of Vista to be ready for shipping to OEM’s on the 31st August 2006. With a hopeful RTM of late October.

The Sony site Revamp

Sony has revamped the http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/ web site to include details of the following:

An overview of ‘Actions to Date’ on XCP Software
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/index.html

Two slightly different formatted ‘Customer letters’
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/customerletter.html
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/home.html

Voluntary ‘Exchange Program’ – Which is only valid if you have a US Postal Address
Bad luck for the 120,000 Canadians. I presume Amazon will contact any international customers.
http://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

A Full title list of affected ‘Media Discs’
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/titles.html

An Enhanced Contact US page including a Toll Free Telephone Number
We encourage you to use this site as a resource for your questions.
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/contact.html

And an updated FAQ Page
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/faq.html

Now if we could only get Sony to remove the titles from sale on their own ‘Sony Music Online’ website instead of just the album cover image. In the case of Neil Diamond title from here
This withdrawal program has been and is being widely communicated.
Maybe just not communicated very well within your own orginisation.

Barnes & Noble also still have it available here which came from a link on the ‘Non-Flash’ version of Neil Diamond’s site.

The interesting part is that nowhere on the site is the word ‘Recall’ used. It is only a ‘Consumers who wish to exchange’ program. Sony would you advise the mainstream press that you have an exchange program for the affected titles.

Sony has been clever to avoid the ‘Product Recall’ wording from the information so that they would not need to make a media ‘Press Release’ regarding this issue. If they did make it a ‘Product Recall’ the mainstream media would need to be notified of such and a statement would need to be included similar to ‘These 52 titles from the SonyBMG catalogue contain a security threat to personal computer users.’

This would give openness and transparency for all the ‘Loyal Customers’ of these great musicians who do not deserve such appalling treatment. So that the ‘not so well’ informed computer user would also know about this. And not to mention the people who are yet to even attempt to insert the ‘Media Disc’ into their computer. Not everyone reads weblogs Sony. The mainstream media have been alarmingly quiet on this subject thus far, they have no issue in publishing stories regarding other such ‘Mass Malware and Security threats’ that occur on a large scale on the internet or in the public.

Have you also notified all of your recording artists that this has affected so the publicists and representatives of these artists may also take appropriate action that they will need to do so they can inform there ‘Loyal Fans’.

The security implications of this piece of negligent software need to be made public via traditional media. There are definitely far more unsuspecting users who have not inserted the ‘Media Disc’ into their ‘Microsoft Windows Environment’ which may include any computers that also run virtualised machines on top of Microsoft, Apple or Unix/Linux operating systems. As this software does have hardware issues that may affect the functionality of a computer owners CD-Rom device.

Sony revamps XCP Support Site

Sony have completly revamped the XCP support site and added a hug amount of content.

Time to start trawling the site and find the ‘fine print’

http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/home.html