The New Windows 10 Release Schedule is a Win For Us All (Premium)

As you might have seen, Microsoft this week announced that it would align its Windows 10 and Office 365 development schedules. But And as we should expect of Microsoft, it buried the real news.

On a side note, it's interesting to me how different people and publications cover the same story.

For example, I presented this information as I do above: This story is about the alignment of those development schedules. But some enthusiast blogs focused on the next version of Windows specifically---"Redstone 3 coming in September"---while most noted that the new schedule would mean two "major" (feature) updates per year, in March and September for both product lines. (Engadget got it completely wrong, noting that "Windows 10's biannual update schedule starts in September." It started in March with the Creators Update.)

This isn't a criticism: All of these writers get credit for looking past Microsoft's marketing message. And in keeping with that journalistic tradition, I've been thinking about what the Microsoft announcement really means as well. And I think I can add a few more nuances to this story.

To date, I've used my own terminology to describe Microsoft's various Windows 10 update types because I don't feel that the way that software giant describes these things is accurate. In Updating in Windows 10 Version 1703? You Win Some, You Lose Some, for example, I noted that Microsoft provides two types of updates for Windows 10: Feature updates, which literally add new features, and "other" updates, which are quality improvements that can include security and bug fixes only.

"Feature updates are delivered once or twice a year, and because they upgrade Windows 10 to a new version, I think of them as upgrades," I wrote. "For example, the Anniversary Update was a feature update, or upgrade, as it upgraded Windows 10 to version 1607 and added many new features."

"Those 'other' updates---what I just call updates---typically appear once a month on Patch Tuesday, bundled in groups called cumulative updates," I added. "But they can appear individually, and at any time."

So this week, Microsoft announced that it would now deliver Windows 10 feature updates---major upgrades, or, literally, new versions of Windows---twice a year. And that's interesting to me on a number of levels.

For starters, I've been arguing that Windows as a Service (WaaS), the underlying strategy to keep Windows 10 "evergreen" with new features and updates as if it were some kind of online service, is broken. That it simply cannot work with a bucket of code as big, old, and interwoven as Windows. It doesn't work in big ways---as when the Anniversary Update hit the ground so hard it still wasn't fully deployed 9 months later---and in small ways as well; any update could go south on Windows, at any time.

But whatever. That's just my opinion, and while it may be backed by tons of evidence, things can certainly improve over time.

And maybe they are improving...

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