Ask Paul: June 16 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here's an epic set of reader questions to kick off the weekend and the coming start of summer a bit early.
Windows 11 version 23H2 testing
madthinus asks:

I have been thinking about Windows 23H2. When will we test it? Where is it being build? What would be in it. Initially you speculated that the Canary builds will be early Windows 12, but looking at what is being exposed there, is that actually 23H2? Will the key features be what was showed off at Build 2023, key among them the never combine on the taskbar? Is it too early to ship Windows Co-Pilot in the 23H2 time frame or Developer Drive? For all the communication and transparity we actually know very little.

The dynamic here has changed dramatically, and this is something I still struggle with. You can see that in my endless discussions about how Microsoft tests (or doesn't test) and ships new features, and how this system has evolved into one in which we can literally get individual new features at almost any time. My brain still thinks in terms of product releases, which are increasingly a thing of the past, at least from the perspective of new feature boundaries. Now, releases---like 23H2---are just milestones for purposes of support.

This is a long way of saying that we're already testing much of what will constitute 23H2 and that, for businesses, 23H2 will largely be composed of features that individuals have already received from Microsoft in the form of quarterly Moment releases, monthly quality updates, and interim random (CFR) feature additions. That is, in any given quarter, Windows 11 users see some number of new features, and 23H2, being the culmination of one of those quarters, will see both some number of new features plus (for businesses) all the new features that arrived in the previous three quarters.

I find this ... confusing. But it's not just Microsoft: when Google discussed Android 14 at Google I/O it was asked why this release seemed kind of minor and various publications compared this relatively boring approach to Apple's annual "big bang" approach where they still focus on a big milestone releases (iOS 17, etc.) that each come with some long list of new features. And the answer was interesting and bears on what Microsoft is doing: Apple still relies on these annual releases because they sell new iPhones (and whatever other devices), and the two are timed to occur with each other, with the software often including some features that are specific to the new version of the hardware. But Android is treated like Windows, it gets updates all the time, in the form of quarterly Pixel Feature Drops (for Pixels only), monthly Android updates, and routine feature updates through the Play Store (not just apps). Google is using the same "continuous innovation" strategy as Microsoft and that just doesn't lend itself to big bang annual releases.

To be clear, I have to remind myself of this all the time. I'm so old school that I have a hard time d...