Microsoft, Transparency, and You (Premium)

After pointlessly making us wait for months to discover what Windows 10 version 19H2 was all about, Microsoft talked up its “commitment to transparency.”

Look, I’m glad that Windows 10 version 19H2 worked out the way it did. And that’s true both personally and in my self-appointed role as Microsoft customer/community advocate. As I noted last night in A Windows 10 Field Guide Update, Microsoft’s decision to turn 19H2 into the Service Pack/R2-type release that Mary Jo Foley and others have been calling for will help me get the book caught up and, better yet, keep it that way for a long, long time to come.

More important---I realize this isn’t just about me---Microsoft is, for now at least, doing the right thing for its customers. And that’s a phrase I haven’t been able to use a lot with regards to Windows 10, at least not since the initial release of this system. Windows 10 is awesome in many ways and is, of course, the best Windows version ever, yadda-yadda-yadda. But it also has problems big and small. The biggest of which includes its egregious and ever-expanding in-box advertising, in-box crapware, and non-disableable telemetry, in which your PC is silently sending usage data back to Microsoft whether you want that or not.

But the biggest problem with Windows 10 has always been the fiction that Microsoft calls “Windows as a Service.” In today’s era of Fake News, the very phrase “Windows as a Service” as changed, unsubtly, to “Windows is a service.” (Emphasis mine.)

No, Microsoft. It is not.

In truth, Windows is the exact opposite of a service. It is a gigantic, complex legacy codebase that is overstuffed with decades of continual changes, many long since abandoned, and is bursting at the seams, crying out for a replacement. It is the technological equivalent of Naples, Italy, a place where mountains of garbage cover the wonderful history hidden beneath.

Windows has also become the lens through which we can view Microsoft’s jealousy of the companies and platforms that have surpassed it in the past decade and a half. Specifically, the adoption of a mobile apps platform and store which make absolutely no sense in a desktop environment---now, finally, killed off for good---and, even worse, this WaaS nonsense. By which Microsoft could emulate the way in which mobile platforms like Android and iOS are updated.

With one wrinkle, of course.

Like Android and iOS, Windows 10 receives scheduled monthly security and bug fix updates; Microsoft calls these quality updates. And to be fair, we might credit Microsoft for inventing this concept, sort of: Patch Tuesday, after all, has been a thing for quite a while. (I don’t get to describe Microsoft inventions very much, so enjoy that.)

But Microsoft has exploded the updating scheme popularized by mobile platforms in two ways. First, the firm has increasingly started issuing quality updates multiple times each month and not just once. The very ...