Explaining the 1903/1909 Explanation (Premium)

Prompted by well-deserved criticism, those responsible for explaining what’s happening to Windows 10 have explained their recent inability to communicate clearly.

Naturally, it comes in the form of a short update to a previous blog post that no one will even notice. Because, again—and I apologize for beating this to death—this organization cannot explain anything clearly or effectively.

Here’s what’s happening.

On Monday, Microsoft again amped up the confusion around the current version of Windows 10 (1903) and the next (19H2, now called 1909). As you may know, this year Microsoft dramatically changed how it is testing future version(s) of Windows 10 by pushing Windows Insiders on the Fast ring to 20H1, a version of Windows 10 that won’t ship until the first half of 2020. But it didn’t explain what was happening to Windows 10 version 19H2, the next version of Windows 10, until months later.

Why it was silent on this topic for so long is still unknown, but the short version is that 19H1 is being treated as a service pack of sorts, and it will be delivered to customers as a cumulative update, not a feature update. 19H1 will come with no new features enabled by default; what few new features there are will need to be enabled manually by users. Which is fine. But it didn’t begin testing 19H2 with Insiders in the Slow ring until very late in July.

Since then, there has been controversy, and this cuts to the heart of the (lack of) effectiveness of the Insider program: Instead of just testing 19H2, Microsoft has escalated its practice of A/B testing, such that only 10 percent of Slow ring members saw the new features. As always, Microsoft offered no way to opt-in or opt-out of new 19H1 features, an issue for many Insiders, since they explicitly signed up to test Windows 10. What most Insiders have experienced, in both the Fast ring and Slow ring over time, is a random system by which they install builds and hope to see new features.

And then it got weirder: This week, Microsoft pushed 19H2 to the Release Preview ring too. But it continued its practice of A/B testing, with only 10 percent of those testers seeing new features. And, more confusingly, it instituted a new build numbering scheme without really explaining it.

Today, in that blog post addendum, Microsoft is finally explaining the new build numbering scheme more clearly.

“To offer a clarification on these releases, 19H1 [the retroactively renamed 1903] and 19H2 [which is now called 1909] share the same servicing content,” the explanation begins. “That means they share the same Cumulative Update package.”

I assume they mean the same cumulative update packages: That, going forward, each time a CU is released for Windows 10 version 1903, it will be released in identical form for 1909 as well. (This must dramatically simplify Microsoft’s servicing needs, as an aside.)

“For the small subset of Windows Insiders (the 10%) in Release Preview who were given the option to install 19H2, an enablement package is downloaded from Windows Update that turns on the 19H2 features. This changes the build number for the OS from 19H1 Build 18362 to 19H2 Build 18363.”

To be clear, each version of Windows 10 is identified in several different ways, and that really adds to the confusion.

Windows 10 version 1903 is sometimes incorrectly named (even by Microsoft, which is irritating) for the update that upgraded Windows 10 to this version (the May 2019 Update). It is now, only retroactively, called Windows 10 19H1, though it was never called that during development. And it can also be called Windows 10 build 18362, though there is also a minor number always added to that which indicates the cumulative update level as well; today, that the full Windows 10 version number is 18362.329. In any event, Windows 10 version 1903 is Windows build 18363.xxx, where “xxx” is some number that increments as we move forward.

Because Windows 10 version 1909 (nee 19H2) is basically just Windows 10 version 1903, Microsoft needs a way to differentiate it from its predecessor; this version is essentially a better tested and more up-to-date version that will be serviced longer for its volume license customers. So it is pretending that it is a feature update. And it is incrementing, or forking, the major part of the build number by 1, to 18363. So the most current build of Windows 10 1909 is 18362.329.

As a reminder, to this day, only 10 percent of Insiders have ever seen it. Even though it’s about to ship to the world.

“Because they use the same servicing content, the build revision number (the number that comes after the dot) will always match between 19H1 and 19H2,” the explanation continues. “As we continue to test our servicing packages in the Release Preview ring, Insiders on 19H1 and 19H2 will get a single Cumulative Update with the same fixes.”

And that’s true whether those Insiders are still on 1903 (19H1), with no new features (90 percent of them) or on 1909 (19H1) with the new features (only 10 percent of them). It’s also true that Insiders cannot choose to get the new features, or to install 19H1, even though Insiders explicitly choose which ring to test, and that doing so has always—until this year—dictated what you got. Now, Microsoft is secretly making that decision for you, and when you enroll a PC in the Insider program and choose either Slow or Release Preview, which must be the most popular rings, there is only a 10 percent chance you will get the version of Windows 10 you select.

And that, folks, is a problem. I’d like to say it’s the problem. But the other big problem is that this explanation only adds a bit of clarity to something Microsoft should have explained clearly in the original post. It certainly doesn’t add anything to the explanation I already provided; I had to muddle through that on my own, just as did Insiders trying to make sense of that original Microsoft post. And it absolutely does not address the bigger issue here: That this organization cannot communicate effectively and that it has been doing wrong by both Windows and Insiders, its most enthusiastic audience, all year long. Longer, really. But this year has been particularly terrible.

Microsoft, this isn’t about me. It’s about what is clearly a dwindling number of people testing future versions of Windows 10, and that you’re the reason their enthusiasm is failing. It’s time to turn this around.

Note: Looking over this post, I see that I jump back and forth between 1903/1909 and 19H1/19H2 naming. It’s hard if not impossible not to do so: Windows 10 version 1903 was always called that, but Microsoft has recently started using 19H1 because it has always called Windows 10 version 1909 that (just as it has always called Windows 10 version 20H1 that). What a mess. I will promise you this, however: I will never use the name of an update to describe a version of Windows 10. –Paul