Upgrade for security, Microsoft boss tells customers

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of the company's older operating systems that they will have to upgrade if they want to use the internet securely.

Speaking during a visit to London, Ballmer hinted that there is unlikely to be anything like the Windows XP Service Pack 2 for customers using pre-XP operating systems.

"Why doesn't everyone move [operating systems]? I think that it doesn't serve customers' best interests to release SP2 for Windows 2000 users," he said.

"It would not offer anything like the benefits they would get from upgrading and, if we released it, it would be a bad solution for [customers] to take it."

Ballmer identified notebook users and home workers as the highest priority for upgrades. These users are the highest risk to corporate security, particularly laptop users moving inside and outside the IT perimeter on a regular basis.

He stressed that security is the number one priority at Microsoft, and would remain so at least until the end of the decade.

Ballmer described the company's current progress towards secure computing as quite good, but stressed that there is a lot more work to be done.

He added that the delay to the release of Microsoft's forthcoming Longhorn operating system is due partly to development resources being assigned to SP2 instead.

"It was not a case of people being pulled from one room and stuck in another," said Ballmer. "But people working on core technologies and system integrators were focused on SP2, which took capacity away from Longhorn."