What Happened to the Fall Creators Update We Were Promised? (Premium)

As Windows 10 Fall Creators Update development winds down, it's time to examine whether Microsoft will come through on its promises for this release. This is no small issue, frankly: With Windows 10, the firm has a spotty track record doing so with every release.

And that's a problem. Microsoft in general, and the Windows team specifically, absolutely intend to do the right thing, I'm sure of it. But they often do not. And as I've often observed over the years, the thing that Microsoft gets wrong most consistently is communications. This falls (ahem) into that category.

On a side note, Microsoft also gets branding horribly wrong. The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update isn't just a bad name, it's a name that doesn't make sense on numerous levels. I took it to mean that Microsoft would use this update to actually deliver on the "creator" functionality it promised for the first Creators Update, and I still believe that to be correct. (In the sense that that was the intention.)

But as Brad pointed out earlier today, the Fall Creators Update branding is also wrong because most of the world doesn't actually call that time of year "Fall." In many cases, it's "Autumn," so Microsoft will actually call this update the Autumn Creators Update in certain locales. But for fully one-half of the world, that time of year is actually Spring. I have dubbed this thing the "Windows 10 I've Fallen And I Can't Create Update."

Speaking of which, Microsoft has never actually explained how arrived at the term "creator." But I have a great guess: This is an attempt to wrestle a key influencer part of the market away from Apple. What I do know, however, is that the term is really just a new way of saying "productivity," which has always been the PC's strong suit. That is, you're not a writer, you're a creator of documents. Developers are creators, obviously. Gamers can be creators, too, by streaming their sessions live on Mixer. In other words, we're all creators, using the loosest definition of the word.

And that kind of makes the name less special, when you think about it. If creating is something we all do, then calling it out as the brand seems kind of silly. As many have noted, and I will echo, Microsoft should stick to the year-based version numbers (Windows 10 version 1709 and so on) and leave the fun branding to sillier products. We use Windows 10 for work, and I wish Microsoft was a bit more serious about that. Plus, that kind of version number is immediately clear.

Well, it is what it is. Except for one thing: The Fall Creators Update is not what it is. Or rather, what it is supposed to be. At Build 2017, Terry Myerson and a succession of Microsoft executives stood up on stage and regaled us with the features we could expect from the Fall Creators Update. But as with the Creators Update before it, where I fact-checked a complete bogus promo video that is still inexplicably still available online, what we're getting in no way measures up to w...

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