Microsoft Celebrates 20 Years of Patch Tuesday Like It Can’t Be Bothered

Microsoft’s John Cable marked the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday, or what’s now known as the Tuesday of Week B in the software giant’s Windows update schedule.

“This year marks a very important milestone for the history of Microsoft, the Windows product, and for greater computing: 20 years of Patch Tuesday updates,” he writes. “With more than 1.4 billion monthly active Windows devices in service, and billions more devices served along the journey of Windows, our goal is to keep users around the world protected and productive.”

Cable’s history is vague on the details, and there are only date ranges, not specific dates. So we learn that Patch Tuesday came out of Microsoft’s 2002 Trustworthy Computing initiative, which has oddly come up a few times recently. And that the first Patch Tuesday arrived … sometime in 2003. Sometime between 2008 and 2012, Microsoft added Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) for organizations. And then Windows 10 arrived in “2013 to 2017” with “Windows as a Service.” (It was 2015.) And so on.

It’s too bad he couldn’t have been bothered to be more detail-oriented here, given the entire point of Patch Tuesday. Ah well.

“Microsoft remains committed to our mission,” he adds. “Our investments help every individual and organization around the world to achieve more, while staying protected and productive with Windows.”

And then it just gets silly, assuming you have any knowledge of the past year. Patch Tuesday has evolved to be “principle-based,” he says. That means it’s predictable, simple, agile, and transparent, except of course that this is exactly what Patch Tuesday and Windows updating aren’t.

So yeah, let’s pour one out for Patch Tuesday, something that was created at a time when Microsoft took Windows and the customers who use it seriously. I’d love to see a return to the predictable, simple, agile, and transparent days of yore. I miss them terribly.