February fables redux

Nine months ago I listed some predictions about MS products, let's see how I did...

SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 5; support is extended beyond April 2008. Wrong. Many shops are still using it but all support including hotfixes has evaporated.

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3. Soon. The Community Technical Preview (CTP) is out now, which rolls up all prior patches & includes some compatibility tweaks for the 2008 Windows and SQL Server editions.

Internet Explorer 8 is released; IE 6 is still the most-used, but continues to lose ground to Firefox. Soon. The beta is out, but Google's Chrome is also in preview form.

Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6; support is continued due to developer demand. Wrong. Classic VB is dead for all practical purposes, however it remains alive & vibrant in the persona of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in every Office app thru the 2007 version.

Windows XP Service Pack 3. Correct. Thank goodness they're still keeping this one alive, and even extended the timelines for OEM's to preinstall the OS.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1; still nobody wants it. Correct. It is finally being recognized as a consumer OS. The upcoming Windows 7 will probably be what Vista should have been.

And let's not forget that MS made a $44 billion offer for Yahoo. Reject. Lots of stories about this, but nothing ever became of it.