The 23H2 Mystery, Solved (Premium)

Last week, Microsoft revealed that what we think of as Windows 11 version 23H2 will mostly be delivered separately to users on 22H2 starting tomorrow, September 26. This was surprising on many levels, but given the topsy-turvy ways in which Microsoft has continuously changed how it brings new features to Windows, I chalked this up as just another crazy episode in this manic year. But it’s been nagging at me. Why would Microsoft do this? It literally makes no sense.

Except, of course, that it does. And thanks to a new report by the ever-reliable Zac Bowden, who checked with his sources at the software giant, we can finally answer this elusive question and do so definitively.

And it goes like this: Microsoft decided to shift most (if not all) of the features it had planned to deliver in Windows 11 version 23H2 as a new “Moment” update for Windows 11 version 22H2. And that’s because Moments are mandatory, meaning that all users on 22H2 will get all the new features---especially Windows Copilot, which is key to Microsoft’s strategy for growth this year---whether they want them or not. If it had delivered these features first with 23H2, users, especially businesses, could opt to skip the upgrade, because these annual Feature Updates (version upgrades) are optional.

That’s right. Microsoft is jamming Windows Copilot---and, what the heck, a bunch of other features---down its users’ throats in yet another example of enshittification, in which a platform maker makes product decisions based on its strategic needs and at the expense of its customers’ needs and wants. These decisions seem hostile because they are hostile.

The stage for this shift was set two years ago when Microsoft released Windows 11. I won’t rehash this whole history yet again, but the entire point of this release was to formally change the Windows support lifecycle yet again. And it started innocently enough. Windows 11, we were told, would scale back the crazy Windows 10 update schedule by which this system was given two Feature Updates---full version upgrades---twice each year. Now, we would face just one Feature Update each year. Nice.

And it was nice, at first. But where Windows 11’s first year was marked mostly by how slowly Microsoft moved to address the obvious feedback about functional regressions, its second year will be best remembered for the incredible pace at which the firm added new features, almost every single month, to the product. Since the release of the 22H2 Feature Update in September/October 2022, we’ve been assaulted by a bewildering array of new features as Microsoft shifted its delivery schedule again and again. Or, as Microsoft calls it, we’ve been blessed by its “continuous innovation.”

In July, Microsoft finally published a whitepaper called Windows updates and the shared servicing model in which it documented its current updating strategy. And I took the release of this whitepaper to mean that the changes h...