Let’s Talk About Sets (Premium)

I spent much of 2017 complaining that Microsoft would routinely promise new features for a coming Windows 10 feature update---first with the Creators Update and then with the Fall Creators Update---and then quietly never deliver on those promises.

My criticism was easily defended: Microsoft did exactly what I said it did. But things got ugly, twice.

Last summer, in the wake of my complaints about Microsoft over-promising and under-delivering on Windows 10 features, Joe Belfiore inexplicably took to Twitter to claim that he had, in fact, never promised anything explicit. That was untrue. And I was easily able to prove this by pointing out the many times he had, in fact, explicitly promised specific new features in the Fall Creators Update. You can watch the video yourself.

Then at Build 2018, Joe actually took a swing at me on stage by again repeating his earlier claim. He said that because "people" had in the past "assumed" that the new features he discussed would appear in the very next feature update, or at all, that he would be clearer this year that the features he was discussing may or may not happen, In 2018, or ever. I called this comment "disingenuous" at the time. That's the nice way to put it, I guess.

But then I already knew that my comments about "over-promising and under-delivering" had rankled Microsoft. When I asked Terry Myerson in early 2018 why the Redstone 4 feature update had never been given a name or had a reviewers workshop, he told me that it was my fault. That Microsoft was not going to over-promise and under-deliver again. Eventually, of course, Myerson was out. And the Redstone 4 update did get named, finally, to the April 2018 Update.

Despite all that, we can at least take some solace in the fact that Microsoft has been reasonably clear that Sets was something that may or may not ship in some Windows 10 feature update. As you may recall, it was first announced in November last year and was supposed to ship in the April 2018 Update. Set has always been a bit controversial due to Microsoft's use of A/B testing. And it has always seemed just buggy enough not to make the cut.

But when Terry told me that little nugget mentioned above, he also said that he still hoped, at that time, that it would make it into the April 2018 Update, as we now call it. But now it will not ship in the Redstone 5 feature update, either. So the soonest it will appear in the OS now is April 2019.

And, to be clear, I am OK with that.

The thing with Sets is that it's integral to Windows. It's not an app that can be updated routinely. So Microsoft needs to get it right. If the firm were to ship a buggy or incomplete version of Sets in some Windows 10 feature update, it would need to wait for a future Windows 10 release, six months later, to fix it.

And to be fair to Microsoft, taking 18 months to deliver such a thing---or more, since this had to have been conceived well before the November 2017 announcement---is als...

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