Patch Tuesday

This is the name of the second Tuesday of each month when Microsoft send out patches to fix its bugs.

And there's a lot of bugs. Always has been. Always will be.

How they have the gall to continuously shaft their customers is mindblowing.

Even way back in the 90s, I vividly recall one tech company founder I worked with bemoan how Big Bill had spent a lifetime of never having any ethos remotely resembling customer care.

In an echo of the joke;

only two industries call their customers 'users'; drug dealers and software vendors.

Microsoft have never had an original product idea in their lives.

And now their latest shameless trick. To shackle the world to a "video" call solution that is so unsuited to unleashing the wonders of the medium, that it brings anyone like me trying to help Homo Businesso truly progress to floods of tears.

January 2022's Patch Tuesday saw a torrent of problems this time round.

98 security vulnerabilities being patched.

Of those, 9 scored the horrifying top marks of between nine and ten out of ten in terms of their severity. Six of them are what's termed Zero Day vulnerabilities. Meaning the bad guys knew about and used them before MS Towers got wind of them.

So reliable is their unreliability, a whole sector has grown up around it. Third parties discover these vulnerabilities and use them to sell their own security or hacking detection services.

Whilst naturally not at this saddening scale, we could run our own update sessions along these lines though.

Just as everyone's software is buggy, can there ever be a buyer-engaged sales campaign free of a flaw?

Here's a trio of ideas for your own Patch Event.

Patch The Process. Hold an item at your next internal gathering around your sustainable sales process (aka pattern) tweaks.

Patch The Partnership. An emphasis for an account management forum with a valued client. Ostensibly to fix anything that's either gone awry, or may have potential to do so unchecked (unpatched).

Patch The Plan. Run through with your key prospect personalities what aspects of your bid might need recalibrating (hint; anything but price).

In the spirit of Seattle code, you might even set such updates to automatic. For just as with Microsoft fixes, the balance of risk of a bad patch is likely outweighed by the fact that there's so many bugs out there to cause you harm.