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. You may recall that I’ve opined on a number of occasions that I expect the Creators Update rollout to go much better than that of its predecessor, that Microsoft is being conservative this time but in fact plans to over-deliver. I’ve likewise noted, perhaps a bit too strenuously, that the Creators Update doesn’t exactly offer a lot in the way of new features. It is, in so many ways, a minor upgrade, not a major upgrade.

And that, I think, is the plan.

Increasingly, it seems that this new schedule isn’t about making “major changes to Windows twice a year,” as CNBC described the schedule. But rather about releasing less dramatic feature updates twice a year. Pedants will point out that this was always the plan, sort of. But that’s not accurate: Microsoft did indeed expect to deliver major functional updates to Windows twice a year, originally. But I think its experience with the Anniversary Update taught them a big lesson: They could either release one major update per year, or they could release two less-major feature updates per year.

I believe they’ve chosen the latter.

The other major change here is the Windows support lifecycle change that was buried in this announcement. As most of you know, major Windows versions have always been supported for 10 years, split between 5 years of mainstream support and 5 years of extended support. But the move to Windows 10 and WaaS triggered a number of questions about how Microsoft would address this contractual agreement with its enterprise customers, especially. Questions which only now, almost two years later, are finally being answered.

“Each Windows 10 feature release will be serviced and supported for 18 months,” Microsoft General Manager Bernardo Caldas explained, quite clearly.

Now, going from 10 years to 18 months is obviously fairly dramatic, but I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison since Microsoft previously only said that it might add new features to any given Windows version during that initial 5-year mainstream support period. Going from 5 years to 1.5 years (18 months) is likewise a big change. But I think we all knew this hammer was going to drop eventually: As I’ve pointed out many times, the number of Windows 10 versions Microsoft would have to support otherwise would completely undermine the entire point of WaaS.

Think about it. The goal of WaaS, ultimately, is to get as many PCs as possible on the very latest version of Windows. This goal is technically impossible, of course, and with businesses, especially, we’re going to see various versions of Windows 10 out in the wild at any given time. Each requires its own special version of every patch, software fix, bug fix, or new feature that Microsoft releases. It’s a support nightmare.

In the past, the 10-year Windows support lifecycle guaranteed that Microsoft would be supporting several different Windows versions—Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.0, Windows 8.1, whatever—at any time. Moving forward, these will change to Windows 10 versions only, eventually. But as of today, there are already four versions of Windows 10 out in the wild—versions 1507, 1511, 1607, and 1703—and now we can expect two more every single year. They have to draw the line somewhere.

And that line should result in Microsoft supporting fewer Windows versions than it did in the past. That has to be the point. And sure enough, the line they’ve drawn—18 months, or 1.5 years—will result in there never being more than three versions of Windows 10 to support. This may not please some businesses—in fact, I’m curious to see what the pushback will be here—but it makes the WaaS mess a lot more manageable, from Microsoft’s perspective.

Anyway, I think those two items—making feature updates less major, if you will, and killing off older Windows 10 versions sooner—were the real point of this announcement. And if the Creators Update rollout goes as well as I think it will, you can expect this to be the model for these feature updates going forward. This is a good thing: Feature updates will be less disruptive for everyone, and let’s be honest with ourselves: Windows is a mature product line. How on earth could Microsoft issue a major new version of Windows, with lots of new features, every year, let alone every six months?

In other words, this is about Microsoft easing up on the throttle and making the Windows update schedule more predictable, and saner. And I think that makes sense for all of us.