Declaring Victory Against WaaS (Premium)

Four years after revealing its plans to update Windows 10 like an online service, Microsoft has finally stepped back from the cliff and admitted defeat. It will no longer force Windows Updates on any users, nor will it continue treating Windows 10 Home users, in particular, like guinea pigs.

“We are excited to announce significant changes in the Windows update process, changes designed to improve the experience, put the user in more control, and improve the quality of Windows updates,” Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Fortin announced in a most unexpected about-face. “We have heard clear feedback that the Windows update process itself can be disruptive, particularly that Windows users would like more control over when updates happen.”

Have you, now?

As perhaps the fiercest and most vocal critic of Microsoft’s continual and forced updating scheme, called Windows as a Service (Waas), I’ve been met with nothing but heel-digging rebuttals and claims of high quality from the software giant. This, while the last two Windows 10 Feature Updates—which, again, are really full Windows version upgrades—have both failed in spectacular fashion. So while I appreciate and even applaud Microsoft’s retreat on this terrible behavior, I feel compelled to point out that it was obviously wrong all along.

And that I have never stopped complaining about the horrible way it was treating its own users. In doing so, I was defending Microsoft’s customers. Something the software giant could have taken a bit more seriously years ago.

The problems with this scheme popped up immediately, and I noted in mid-2015 that Windows 10 Home users, in particular, were under the gun in a world in which Windows Updates would arrive at least once every single month, with feature updates arriving twice per year.

“Those with Windows 10 Home will be unable to turn off automatic updating,” I noted. Mary Jo Foley started referring to those users as Microsoft’s “guinea pigs” for updates; they were basically the front line on quality control, and if something did go wrong, only those on Windows 10 Pro or higher—who could defer updates for lengthy time periods—would be saved.

By October 2016, I had had enough. “Windows as a Service isn’t working,” I wrote. “We’re all in a perpetual beta, where the speed of these updates and the explicit understanding that they will always be followed my more updates, means that quality control can lapse. If Microsoft screws up an update, no worries: They can and will just patch it again, because they can. And patch it and patch it and patch it. Which they have.”

Worse, WaaS made Windows 10 an unmanageable mess, not just for users, but for Microsoft, too.

“Windows as a Service has created more platform fragmentation, not less. That was not the goal of this initiative,” I wrote. “As of March 2017 or so, Microsoft and its customers will have four versions of Windows 10, plus two other Windows versions, 7 and 8.1, to support. So much for simpler servicing: Had Microsoft simply not gone down the Windows as a Service path, it would have only three versions to support: Windows 7, 8.1, and 10. But instead, it will have 6. That’s double the number of supported platforms, double the attack surfaces to protect, and double the number of patches it needs to create for the same problems. Again, it’s more fragmentation, not less. A lot more.”

In mid-2017, another problem with WaaS surfaced when Microsoft was forced to admit that it could not update certain Intel Atom-based PCs to the Windows 10 Creators Update. In doing so, I wrote, it proved that Windows as a Service (Waas) is unsustainable.

“Microsoft’s support matrix for Windows 10 was already, I think, unsustainable,” I noted. “But now they’ve added the first of what will clearly be a never-ending series of one-off exceptions that will require them to develop security fixes for older, otherwise unsupported versions of Windows 10 on an arbitrarily-extended timeline. And to do so only for very specific PC configurations. Let me put this simply: Windows as a Service is not just unsustainable, it’s impossible.”

“Windows as a Service will collapse under its own weight,” I correctly predicted. That just happened, folks.

So yeah, big round of applause for the changes. And this is victory, not for me, but for all Windows 10 users. But seriously. What took so freaking long?