Why is it that everyone ignores that microsoft is just like any other company, and it has responsibilities to its stakeholders.... How much do you think it costs them to make a product.... You've got salaries, development equipment, research and development and marketing...... your easily looking at 100's of millions of dollars, most likely more than that.....
Okay, I agree with you, MS is a company just like other ones, it has to make benefit. All right.
But don't forget that MS always tries to impose users to use HIS OS, not any other.
And very often, (that's not to say every time) when a new windows version is commercialised, it's always full of bugs (jsut look at all the "security fix", the "service pack", immediately available . You'll say that the perfect software doesn't exist, yet. Maybe, but I think MS should make *serious* efforts to improve the quality of his products.
Another thing : MS is trying to gain 100% control on his users : for example, in the latest winXP, there are a lot of "hidden" functionnalities that always redirect to microsft, or its affiliates. In the Explorer, when you're browsing a directory that contains audio files, what does explorer offers to you ? "Buy music on the Internet". Of course, it redirects you to a MS affiliate. And also : the 404 errors, when using internet explorer : when attempting to reach a non available page, windows automatically redirects you to the MS search engine, MSN.
So in conclusion, this SP1 for XP is certainly another attempt to gain more power on the end users, under cover of software protection.