19H2gate (Premium)

Microsoft’s inability to communicate effectively is embarrassing. But it’s also a disservice to its customers. And it needs to be fixed.

Honestly, clarity is not that hard.

Consider Joe Belfiore’s repeated promises at Build over a period of years and then the weird backtracking and lying that ensued when Microsoft couldn’t deliver. Joe B. went so far as to claim in 2017 that he had never promised a certain Windows 10 feature (Timeline) in a particular time frame (the Fall Creators Update). But as I so easily documented, he did promise exactly that, which even a casual viewing of the Build 2017 keynote address still proves.

The lesson? Communicate effectively by simply not promising specific things at specific times and then don’t lie to cover it up when you fail.

But Microsoft doesn’t learn these lessons.

And this is what is so troubling. It just keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. It’s unprofessional. And it’s unfair to customers, who should be able to rely on and trust public utterances by Microsoft executives and employees.

The latest example: Microsoft is inexplicably testing not the next version of Windows 10 right now, a version called 19H2 that is expected to ship in October, but is instead shipping the version after that, called 20H1. It has never once explained why it is doing this, nor has it ever publicly explained what form 19H2 will take. Is it a service pack type release for 1903? A set of 20H1 features that will be ready early? No idea. As I noted previously, “the assumption has to be that Microsoft feels that its most passionate and enthusiastic fans don’t need to know.”

The only thing Microsoft did say about 19H2 is the following.

“We will begin releasing 19H2 bits to Insiders later this spring and will talk more about what that will look like in the near future,” Microsoft’s Brandon Leblanc wrote on April 5, 2019.

As I wrote at that time, “What this means is unclear … Microsoft must have some plan for testing 19H2.”

If they do, they’ve never said so. But with the clock ticking down to the end of spring as Microsoft knows it---summer starts today, Friday, June 21---Microsoft had to know that people were keeping track. And so Mr. Leblanc took to Twitter, as did Joe B. before him, and … well, he coughed up a hairball in response to legitimate questions raised by a public and official Microsoft statement that he had made.

I can’t link to what he wrote because Twitter has suspended Leblanc's account. That’s hilarious. (Update: It's possible that Leblanc has blocked me for my incessant pursuit of the truth. Less hilarious. More unprofessional. --Paul) But here’s what he wrote, along with my sarcastic reply at the top.

There’s no need to belabor the point. This kind of statement is unprofessional and needs to be corrected. If it wasn’t going to be "spring" as we know it, then you should have said that in the original, sole sta...

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