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 had finally stopped, and that it had finally settled on a schedule that made sense. But I was wrong, of course. The changes keep coming, and this feature dump, in what would otherwise be an innocuous off-month for 22H2 updates, shows that Microsoft will not stop mixing things up. Not when its best interests hang in the balance.

The one thing I didn’t discuss in my previous two attempts at understanding the 22H2/23H2 controversy—The Next Windows 11 Update (Premium) and Windows 11, the Fall Update, 23H2, and You (Premium)—is how these Moments work. This is a topic I’d fleshed out in the past, as part of this crazy year of never-ending changes to Windows updating. But because a new Moment is so key to what Microsoft is doing now, it’s worth re-examining.

If you step back and look at how Microsoft updates Windows 11 today, you can see some key and even semi-documented release milestones. And some that are not at all documented.

There are the Feature Updates that, yes, do arrive once per year. Feature Updates are the annual full-version upgrades that take Windows 11 from one version of the product to the next. They typically reset the support lifecycle and compatibility model, which requires them to be released using a measured process by which the known-good PCs get the upgrade first and the entire process takes months.

23H2 is the next Windows 11 Feature Update, but it is unique in that it will be released as an enablement package, and not via the normal process. (This is something Microsoft routinely does with Windows 10 now, because it no longer gets meaningful new features.) An enablement package, what Microsoft calls an eKB, doesn’t require a servicing branch change, and that means that the existing user base (in this case on Windows 11 22H2) will just get it automatically, with no need to wait: If your PC is compatible with 22H2, it’s compatible with 23H2. It’s like a routine monthly update.

From a frequency standpoint, the next level down is what Microsoft calls “Moment” updates internally. These are quarterly releases that contain multiple new features, and there have been three so far, in December 2022, March 2023, and June 2023. I had theorized that 23H2, a Feature Update, and 22H2 Moment 4 were, in fact, the same thing. And with the switch of 23H2 to an enablement package, this belief had its proof. 23H2 was a fourth Moment for 22H2. (Until it sort of wasn’t: Now, Moment 4 is the September 2023 Windows 11 Update (for 22H2 only) or whatever you want to call it.)

Microsoft also ships monthly updates for Windows 11 and many of these—most of them in the past year—include one or more new features. There are two such updates each month, one that happens on the Tuesday of Week B (the second week of the month, or Patch Tuesday), and one that arrives on the Tuesday of Week D (the fourth week of the month). The Week B update is the public release of that month’s cumulative update. And the Week D update is the optional (preview) release of the next month’s cumulative update. The release of Moment 4/the September 2023 update not coincidentally falls on that exact Week D Tuesday because it is, in fact, an optional (preview) release. The mandatory version will land two weeks later on Patch Tuesday in October.

Related to this, Microsoft still intends to ship something called Windows 11 version 23H2. Given the schedule noted above, I am guessing that the earliest we will see that is now Week D in October in preview/optional form and then on Patch Tuesday in November for the general public. As to its contents, it will of course include everything in the 22H2 Moment 4/the September 2023 update, but it could also include a list of additional features that we’ve been testing all summer in the Insider Program. We’ll see.

Either way, the Moment 4 update tomorrow will be momentous, the biggest set of new features that Microsoft has ever added to Windows 11. Which makes sense, since it was originally a full-version upgrade. But the next full version upgrade, Windows 11 23H2 is anything but, just a small enablement package switch with few if any new features.

And … we actually might have guessed this. Remember, Microsoft announced that it would deliver 23H2 as an enablement package two months ago. This should have set off alarm bells because 23H2 was set to arrive with a ton of new features. (Again, the biggest set of new features that Microsoft has ever added to Windows 11.) But it uses enablement packages for only the smallest possible upgrades. That announcement was a clue that something had changed.

I’m not sure whether to be defensive about this or not.

On the one hand, I feel like we expected Microsoft to deliver most of 23H2 under the covers in the September Patch Tuesday update, but disabled. And that the 23H2 release would flip the switch, enabling those hidden features. This is not unprecedented, and one could argue that the A/B testing, as I call it, that we see in the Insider Program’s Beta channel—where one set of builds gets new features and one does not—exists entirely to test this exact process. But on the other hand, it’s one of the Monday morning quarterback situations. Only in retrospect was it obvious.

Anyway, I think we’ve solved the mystery. Or, Zack did. And while I’m not happy with the rationale, I always appreciate clarity.