ITNews.com.au is running a story about how the days of "Big Bang" service packs for Windows are a thing of the past, that Vista will instead receive a steady stream of patches and fixes over time.  However, service packs will still exist, they just won't be the massive affairs of Service Pack 1 for XP that came in at 30mb and bundled together a great number of fixes and updates.

The change in approach, according to Michael Sievert, corporate VP for Windows marketing, is due to new development tools and processes that Microsoft used in the creation of Vista lessened the need for the huge service packs of the past.  In essence, Vista was designed to be more easily patched up than previous versions.

This move away from major, often cataclysmic, updates to Windows will likely have the highest impact on enterprise environments, where a service pack can result in multi-month testing and implementations projects that cost millions of dollars.