Let’s Talk About Sets (Premium)

I spent much of 2017 complaining that Microsoft would routinely promise new features for a coming Windows 10 feature update—first with the Creators Update and then with the Fall Creators Update—and then quietly never deliver on those promises.

My criticism was easily defended: Microsoft did exactly what I said it did. But things got ugly, twice.

Last summer, in the wake of my complaints about Microsoft over-promising and under-delivering on Windows 10 features, Joe Belfiore inexplicably took to Twitter to claim that he had, in fact, never promised anything explicit. That was untrue. And I was easily able to prove this by pointing out the many times he had, in fact, explicitly promised specific new features in the Fall Creators Update. You can watch the video yourself.

Then at Build 2018, Joe actually took a swing at me on stage by again repeating his earlier claim. He said that because “people” had in the past “assumed” that the new features he discussed would appear in the very next feature update, or at all, that he would be clearer this year that the features he was discussing may or may not happen, In 2018, or ever. I called this comment “disingenuous” at the time. That’s the nice way to put it, I guess.

But then I already knew that my comments about “over-promising and under-delivering” had rankled Microsoft. When I asked Terry Myerson in early 2018 why the Redstone 4 feature update had never been given a name or had a reviewers workshop, he told me that it was my fault. That Microsoft was not going to over-promise and under-deliver again. Eventually, of course, Myerson was out. And the Redstone 4 update did get named, finally, to the April 2018 Update.

Despite all that, we can at least take some solace in the fact that Microsoft has been reasonably clear that Sets was something that may or may not ship in some Windows 10 feature update. As you may recall, it was first announced in November last year and was supposed to ship in the April 2018 Update. Set has always been a bit controversial due to Microsoft’s use of A/B testing. And it has always seemed just buggy enough not to make the cut.

But when Terry told me that little nugget mentioned above, he also said that he still hoped, at that time, that it would make it into the April 2018 Update, as we now call it. But now it will not ship in the Redstone 5 feature update, either. So the soonest it will appear in the OS now is April 2019.

And, to be clear, I am OK with that.

The thing with Sets is that it’s integral to Windows. It’s not an app that can be updated routinely. So Microsoft needs to get it right. If the firm were to ship a buggy or incomplete version of Sets in some Windows 10 feature update, it would need to wait for a future Windows 10 release, six months later, to fix it.

And to be fair to Microsoft, taking 18 months to deliver such a thing—or more, since this had to have been conceived well before the November 2017 announcement—is also completely understandable, and for the same reasons. Again, this isn’t a mobile app you can just slap together and stick in the store.

What’s interesting to me about this most recent killing of Sets is that I felt like it was getting mature, and that it looked better integrated into the user interface. And so I’m interested in looking at the language Microsoft used to describe this latest setback for clues as to what’s really happening.

In her post about the latest Windows Insider Preview build, the one in which Sets was removed, Dona Sarkar notes that “feedback” triggered the removal. Microsoft, it seems, needs to fine-tune this feature.

“Some of the things we’re focusing on include improvements to the visual design and continuing to better integrate Office and Microsoft Edge into Sets to enhance workflow,” she wrote.

Her quick note about the timeline on Sets returning has also generated some speculation.

“Sets will return in a future [Windows 10 Insider Preview build],” she writes.

That doesn’t actually say that Sets will not be included in Redstone 5. Maybe it will just skip a few builds and then come right back.

But many, including Mary Jo Foley, believe that’s exactly what this means, that Sets has been pushed back, punted, to Redstone 6 (or whatever the early 2019 feature update is called). So this is another case of unclear communication from Microsoft. And it will again lead to uncertainty and speculation.

And ugh.

Ah well. I liked Sets. I still do. And I like that it is (or, was) part of a new continuum of non-nonsense features that focus on admittedly unsexy basic productivity tasks. It’s what Windows 10 needs.

I do wonder, not tangentially, what this means to Redstone 5. As you may recall, I collected up a list of all the features that this release would include, and Sets was basically the only major new feature. (Just as Timeline was really the only major new feature in Redstone 4.)

So I’m curious how Microsoft will sell this release. I do have a theory, and it is also tied to Dona’s most recent blog post. I think that Microsoft will market this coming release on privacy and security.

“When you use our products and services, we want you to feel confident that having great experiences and features does not mean sacrificing your privacy,” she writes in a mini-manifesto called “Our Commitment”. “It’s your device. You deserve to know what’s happening on it.”

Critics will correctly point out that Microsoft’s privacy transparency does not extend to letting users actually prevent Windows 10 from transmitting data back to Redmond. Instead, they can see that data, in a non-human-readable app called the Diagnostic Data Viewer. But that’s a fight for another day. This blog post really veers off the tracks when it comes to the privacy discussion, and I view this as a preview of more formal communications to come.

Anyway, Sets is gone. For now. It will return. We just don’t know when. And life goes on.