It’s Not Just Windows 11 (Premium)

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months trying to figure out Microsoft’s new updating strategy for Windows 11. But this strategy isn’t unique to Windows. Indeed, it’s highly likely that Microsoft’s “continuous innovation” efforts were inspired by the evolution of the mobile systems of which it is so jealous.

And let’s give Microsoft some credit here: when it unveiled the first version of “continuous innovation,” then called Windows as a Service (WaaS), I argued that updating a legacy desktop platform as if it was an online service was a fool’s errand. And the next few years supported this view, with multiple reliability issues undermining the quality of the product.

But there’s another side to this story, where Microsoft also worked to further componentize not just Windows itself but the myriad ways in which different parts of the system can be kept up to date. A big part of the reason that it was able to move from two Feature Updates (version upgrades) per year to just one is that it no longer needs to wait that long to update most system components. It can do so continuously instead.

And as important, the processes have gotten more reliable: where the first several Windows 10 Feature Updates were notable for their problems, the most recent several Windows 10 and 11 Feature Updates had no major issues at all. This, too, is partially due to Microsoft spreading out the updates: with fewer updates to deliver, Feature Updates just don’t have the same potential to cause inadvertent harm. (And we can’t pretend that quality is universally high: Microsoft’s silly desire to ship untested updates via Controlled Feature Releases, or CFRs, has led to functional regressions and, as bad, multiple versions of the same products out in the world. OneDrive is a great example: on some PCs, I can back up five folders to the service, but on others, it’s just three.)

Put simply, I’m not completely OK with continuous innovation for many reasons: Windows doesn’t warrant a steady stream of feature updates, some people will find it confusing, and untested CFRs will almost definitely introduce stability, reliability, or other issues over time among them. But after being pummeled by nearly non-stop updates over the past several years, Microsoft has at least gotten the system to the point where it sort of works. I can concede that.

But it’s always interesting to me when I see other Big Tech firms behaving similarly to Microsoft, a company I understand and care about more than the others. And I saw such a thing in the wake of last week’s Google I/O 2023 conference, where Google and Android-focused publications were issuing complaints that rang very familiar to me. That is, where I used to bemoan that Microsoft’s developer conference, Build, had come up short for Windows in recent years, these guys were complaining that their pet products—the next version of Android and Google Assistant—were virtually ignored at I/O despite having figured prominently in previous shows.

And the stats are kind of interesting. Where Google executives uttered the term “AI” over 110 times in the I/O 2023 keynote, they only mentioned “Android 14” once and “Google Assistant” not at all, these sites reported.

As interesting, Google addressed this concern when asked about it. And here we see another similarity between this Big Tech firm and Microsoft, one related to the overview above about updating Windows. Sameer Samat, Google’s vice president of Android ecosystem, told The Verge that because his company has implemented ways for Android devices to receive updates outside of a once-a-year platform upgrade, like Play System and app updates, it can frame things a little differently now. “So this year, we thought it’s important to show people what’s new in Android from a user experience standpoint, regardless of the OS version,” he said. “While some features that we announced will launch with Android 14, many will arrive in people’s hands through these continuous updates.”

Continuous updates. Interesting choice of words.

It’s also accurate: as any Android user could tell you, many Android system components are now updated through the Google Play Store, so that they can be updated at any time. And as any Pixel user can tell you, Google likewise issues quarterly Feature Drops that add new features to its smartphones and other Pixel-branded products throughout the year. So as is the case with Windows, each annual Android release is, in many ways, less of a big deal because the system is being updated regularly.

Thanks to its monolithic product strategy in which major new iOS versions appear alongside major new iPhone versions, Apple pursues a similar but slightly different strategy in which each iOS release has a long list of new features followed by a series of point releases almost every single month, each of which brings fixes and some new features. For example, iOS 16 shipped in September 2022, but we’re now up to version 16.4.1 after almost a dozen updates in the interim. (You can read all about each of these updates on the Apple Support website.) Basically, Apple relies on the big bang effect each year to help it sell new hardware.

And yes, we might debate whether these mobile platforms warrant this level of updating too. But maybe the answer is obvious: their makers feel the same type of pressure from web apps—which only need to be updated once to impact the entire userbase simultaneously—as Microsoft does from mobile. Perhaps it was inevitable that continuously connected platforms would be continuously kept up to date. I just wish I could trust these companies to do so more reliably.