Future Holds Large Updates Instead of Stand-Alone Windows Releases

jones_supa writes: Jerry Nixon, a Microsoft developer evangelist, said at the Ignite conference in Chicago that Windows 10 "is the last version of Windows, so we're always working on Windows 10." Saying that is only half true. In fact, Microsoft will start working on large updates instead of stand-alone Windows releases, so the company would switch from a model that previously brought us new versions of Windows every three years, to a simpler one that's likely to bring big updates every two months. The company will also change the naming system for Windows, so instead of Windows $(version), the new operating system would be simply called Windows.

Comments

Enterprise Turnover?

[rsmith-mac]

For consumers this is likely a great thing. But given enterprise customers and their traditionally fickle software, how are they going to keep up with major Windows changes every few months?

Even service packs break things, and those still aren't as complex as these proposed updates in some ways. Enterprise customers pretty much count on Windows not changing/ And even if Microsoft goes the LTS route, will they support one of these branches for 10+ years like Windows Server 2012 will be?

Re:Enterprise Turnover?

[Anonymous Coward]

For consumers this is likely a great thing.

Yeah, I can't wait for Windows to change the print subsystem in an update that causes my excessively complex multifunction printer driver suite to put my computer into a reboot loop. As an average consumer, I'd love to have to pay someone to service the machine to fix that.
The same goes for any wireless cards, or storage controllers, or USB peripherals, or ...

Re:Enterprise Turnover?

[Anonymous Coward]

"For consumers this is likely a great thing. "

That depends on how you look at it.

Remember microsoft said it wanted to move people to a subscription model for windows. To force people to keep paying for it over and over. This looks to be how they're going to do it.

So expect to open your wallet for those "big updates".

Re:Enterprise Turnover?

[gl4ss]

and now they want to do away with that. they're already sort of going there with metro. no longevity.

also thats what they experimented with in mobile. 3 years, 3 sdks? 3 ways you're supposed to write your apps windows phone apps? yup, pretty much - and still they haven't released the one thing that was supposed to fix("one platform" approach). also, don't even think of getting new apps for winpho 7.1.

now on the other hand look at the decade of windows mobile before that. fairly good compatibility, even if the phones were overpriced and lacked good phone functionalities - but at least you could depend on the platform if you ran out a business solution for your corporation that needed the platform to stay alive and compatible! that is, until their revolution. that didn't make the sales.

How are they going to charge for this?

[Chrisq]

Will this mean a move to a "subscription" model, where you have to pay to receive updates? I find it hard to believe that they will contunue to update everyone forever without a fee for the "new windows".

Re:How are they going to charge for this?

[sound vision]

The subscription model is exactly what it is, but you can be sure they won't word it that way. Of course they are marketing it as "the last version of Windows", because generally people have been pissed with the new versions. They're not going to quit making money from their flagship product. I'm sure they will structure the pricing to make more. They will release smaller, more frequent updates, hitting you up for money each time - more like the Mac OS release schedule. You can bet they'll play fast and loose with the support cycles too. "Oh, you haven't renewed your subscription for 18 months? Sorry, no more security updates." Forget 12 years of extended support like they did with XP. They might make an exception for businesses that have hundreds of licenses, if they have any sense left in them. But regardless of if you're a business or home user, the OS isn't something that should be changing in radical ways often, or need to be "subscribed" to... it should be a stable platform, a known quantity for you to run your applications on, or develop for, or whatever your use case is.

(Personally I think 7 is great, and that 10 is a step in the right direction, but in the public mind new Windows = bad. Remember how people shat all over XP when it came out, but by 2010 it had gained a reputation as the best version of Windows ever?)

Bypassing consumer resistance to poor design

[BooleanJulian]

Microsoft has a long history of releasing badly designed products- MSDOS 4,Windows Me, Vista, 8.0- and with the shift to updates, the public will lose their ability to vote with their wallets. Microsoft will do whatever it likes, and you will accept it or be unpatched. Microsoft has succeeded in ensuring that the customer has no power or voice.

And everyone here is cheering it on...

Re:Another feature copied from Linux?

[penguinoid]

You mean you'll be able to do "apt-get dist-upgrade" in Windows?

No... there will be differences. We're talking Microsoft, so there's gotta be a revenue stream in there somewhere. They're planning to pretend version numbers don't exist, so that when there's compatibility issues no one will know which version the program was compatible with nor which version they're running now. And there certainly won't be a package manager to deal with all the dependencies, so any incompatibility will be dealt with on a program by program basis.

Re:Firefox

[SumDog]

Um...I actually like the FF/Chrome versioing. I was really hoping either IE or Safari would adopt it as well. If IE (or Spartan or whatever it's called now) goes to it, we'll finally see an end to a lot of corporate internal shit apps and technical debt. It will be painful at first, but once all the major browsers are on rolling updates, web app developers will be forced to make stuff that works correctly. Big shit companies that can't keep up will have to adapt or die.