On the Soapbox

Last Thursday, as I was checking something on Microsoft Update, I noticed that I was no longer being offered WGA Notifications in the critical updates list. That's very odd, I thought. I didn't tell MU to hide the item, nor have I installed it. I switched to another computer and fired up Microsoft Update. Still nothing. In the past, Microsoft has withheld certain updates from certain locales (in fact, WGAN itself was rolled out at different times in different regions), so I wondered if, for some reason, Microsoft had disabled the offering of WGAN to certain groups of users. To check for that, I searched the update catalog for WGAN by name and by the KB number. Nothing. It wasn't all that long ago when I last saw WGAN being listed in the update catalog. Of course, people can still find it at its MSKB article and in the Microsoft Download Center, but it's through Automatic Updates and Microsoft Update that Microsoft shovels WGAN onto people's computers, and it's no longer there.

Of course, I don't care much about WGAN, nor do I care much about whether or not Microsoft is shoveling it onto people's computers. But I was interested to see what the reaction was online, so I looked around. Nothing. Nothing? Yes, I meant nothing. Not even on the once-contentious talk page of the WGA Wikipedia entry. Ever since Thursday, I've searched Google Blog Search and Technorati to see what people had to say about it. And here's the amusing thing: all my searches for recent posts about WGA Notifications turned up only rants and tirades against how evil WGAN is, about how evil Windows is, about how evil Microsoft is (though sadly, none of them recognized Jobs' much more pronounced monopolistic ambitions), etc., etc. Not that I have much love for WGAN either, but it struck me as rather odd (and amusing) that all these people ranting about how annoyed they are at WGAN never picked up on the fact that for the past several days, WGAN was missing from its primary distribution channel!

So what happened? I have no idea. Perhaps they temporarily pulled it in preparation for an update? But it is very unlike them to retract downloads prior to an update. Or have they finally recognized the cost of the bad PR and are quietly shelving it? Or is this just a temporary glitch in Microsoft Update? Guess we'll find out in time...