Microsoft promises twice-yearly Windows 10, O365 updates – with just 18 months' support Microsoft's explained how often it intends to offer “feature updates” to Windows 10: twice a year in March and September. That schedule will bring Windows 10 into line with the update schedule already used by Office 365 ProPlus. Knowing when updates will land is useful. But Microsoft's announcement says “Each Windows 10 …
Now companies will need three teams of system administrators: let's say the A team starts testing the 201704 release for nine months, performs a migration in three months and supports its users for six months, while the B team waits for the 201710 upgrade and a year after the A team, the C team starts testing the 201804 version, when the A team takes a short holiday before tackling the 201810 release, etc.
Since they are only minor updates, 12 months for testing and migration should suffice.
"At least with Windows you can block undesirable updates by pulling the network cable out. On a Chromebook, you can't even do that."
Yeah, you can. You can control which updates are applied and are not applied from the Chrome management console in an enterprise set up. It is pretty awesome. You can set it up where devices are shipped to users wherever they might be directly from the OEM or VAR and when the devices hit the internet the policies are pulled down and the device is automatically enrolled at log on.
"Apparently they don't know how long it takes for some organizations to vet their software against major OS changes."
Presumably that's why the enterprise versions can get 10 years support.
This announcement is about twice a year cross product aligned feature releases - IF you want them. Otherwise you use the LTSB Windows 10 versions with 10 years support.
Twice yearly updates and 18 months between major "releases"? It sounds like Ubuntu, except Ubuntu also has 5 years support on the LTS releases.
Major software projects that have gone to a successful timed release system find that there is much less chance of pushing out dodgy code than there was with a feature based release system. With a feature based release, the code tends to go out whether it's ready or not because the next opportunity may not be for another 5 years. With a timed release system, if a feature is not ready it gets held back until the next release window, which is often no more than 6 months away.
If Microsoft are really going to a timed release system, they will need to overhaul their software development, management, and marketing processes in a very major way. This will not be an easy task for a bureaucracy as large and entrenched as Microsoft's. I won't be surprised to see them fail at it.
And RedHat has 10 years with RHEL. Yes you pay for that but CentOS is built from the same sources and is free.
MS is really trying to force its hand and get everyone locked into this perpetual upgrade cycle.
All it needs is a few major business orgs to say No and MS will have to come up with another plan.
MS clearly has no idea at all of the costs involved in just keeping still. With more and more support being offshored to India, it won't end well.
This
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/04/20/128224/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-report
makes interesting reading.
It won't end well for some businesses and their employees.
""MS is really trying to force its hand and get everyone locked into this perpetual upgrade cycle."
Just like they've always done."
Who downvoted this? That is common knowledge. Are people not familiar with MSFT EAs? Are people not familiar with MSFT intentionally breaking formatting between different versions of Office, not to mention alternative productivity suites.... so that you not only need to use Office, but the latest version of Office?
My experience is far different - with frequent releases companies push out much more shit because "we'll fix it if it doesn't work in the next one". And usually they need to push out something to justify the release, even if a feature is far from being completed and tested, but has been already promised.
Twice yearly updates and 18 months between major "releases"?
That's not what the article said. It simply said new releases every 6 months, with every release supported for 18 months. There was no "major" or "minor" mentioned.
What this means is, if you are running release n, you can potentially skip n+1, and still have a 6-month period to test and migrate to n+2. You can then take a break while n+3 comes out, and then have another 6-month window to migrate to n+4, and so on.
But you are forced to upgrade every 12 months. You can't do an upgrade every 18 months; that would require migrating from n to n+3 the very day it comes out, which would be madness.
It will be interesting to see how much these updates break things...
On the bright side, software developers will be in continuous elevated demand.
Because, all old code will need to be rewritten to run on Win10, because nothing else will be supported, then patched continuously....forever.
I can see CFO's yelling at CTO's while crunching numbers and cursing : )
>Because, all old code will need to be rewritten to run on Win10,
But Win10 is only a marketing label. Remember MS's previously released Win10 release cycle and LTSB, where effectively each LTSB release is equivalent to major version change, which prior to Win10 would be announced as a new and improved version of Windows eg. XP, Windows 7.
So code will need to be constantly 'rewritten' (and recertified in some cases) as MS keep moving the goalposts of Win10 compatibililty.
>I can see CFO's yelling at CTO's while crunching numbers and cursing
Maybe not a bad thing, maybe what's needed are a few Enterprise Linux success and TCO articles in Accountancy magazines...
"Maybe not a bad thing, maybe what's needed are a few Enterprise Linux success and TCO articles in Accountancy magazines..."
I recently watched this happen. CIO came into the new CFO's office and handed him a $7m per year renewal of a MSFT EA. The CFO, not understanding MSFT EAs (therefore taking a common sense approach), asked why they would pay $7m per year for software which they already own, bought the licenses, for commodity stuff like spreadsheets and word processing and operating systems and email. Seems a little excessive. Long story, short. He brought MSFT in, told them to cancel the EA. MSFT was astounded... like the laws of motion were being violated. CFO explained that he was just going to stay on Windows 7 and the current version of Office for years to come, didn't need the upgrades. MSFT told him that they would kill him when he needed to upgrade and it would eventually cost him more. CFO said 'whatever, if you do that I'll just move it all over to Google in a few years.' Done and done.
Or is it just me getting the impression Microsoft is throwing random darts at a board to generate company policy lately?
(And if they are, seems more than a few players have been struck in the head by said darts!) ☺
The past few months have seen an increasing number of WTF? policy shifts and announcements. It almost seems like they want customers to leave.
"Since Windows 7, MS has completely lost the plot."
It's not so much losing the plot, it's just that the old plot stopped working.
Windows 7 was their problem release. People liked it. They didn't want something different. MS has always depended on forcing something new on people because that way they have to buy upgrades or new H/W with the new version pre-installed. When the customers decided they wanted to stick with W7 that broke the business plan.
They could always try a new plot: delivering what customers want.
It's not so much losing the plot, it's just that the old plot stopped working.
Windows 7 was their problem release. People liked it. They didn't want something different. MS has always depended on forcing something new on people because that way they have to buy upgrades or new H/W with the new version pre-installed. When the customers decided they wanted to stick with W7 that broke the business plan.
They could always try a new plot: delivering what customers want.
People certainly did like it, and to every normal person that is a sign of "being onto a good thing". MS were mad for not building on that. Instead Bonkers Balmer decided that a unified desktop / mobile strategy was the way forward which was odd because their competitor (Apple) was making a ton of cash doing the opposite... And they still are.
Part of that was down to shareholder pressure - MS had to do something in the mobile market. Anything but Win 8 would have been ok...
There's a lot of talk these days about the decline of the PC and how we've got no use for them these days. A large part of the decline is down to Win 8, 8.1, 10. I don't buy the argument that people don't want a laptop, desktop type machine in their lives; hipsters in coffee shops with MacBooks are (nearly) living proof of that. People want and need that type of machine, they just don't want it to be Win10.
MS like to claim Win10 is a market success, but I'm not convinced that they've actually sold that much beyond pre installs. The figures MS give out are strikingly similar to the number of PCs the world sells each year...
Anyway, how can something be a market success when that market is shrinking? Win 10 ought to be growing the PC market, not taking over a shrinking market.
In a way MS are like the American car manufacturers vs Toyota. Toyota worked out that what most people want is reliability, comfort, good value for money, economy and high quality, with sporty performance being a distant irrelevance. American auto makers tried to apply the same systems engineering process that Toyota used, didn't believe the results, and ended up making the same old rubbish. Toyota are the biggest car maker in the world, dull/boring can sell really well...
What We Want
We want a well sorted, easy on the eye, familiar, properly supported desktop OS with strong hardware support, no advertising, with a bog standard WIMP interface. Just like Win 7 in fact. We'd even be prepared to pay retail for it.
I don't buy the argument that Linux can be / is this thing. There's too much diversity, hardware support is patchy, GNOME 3 is diabolically bad (file manager?), it doesn't even do sound consistently, there's no good office suite, there's no decent email / contacts / calendar tool, etc. And then there's the whole APT, YUM, tarball, Auto tools thing. It's a horrible mess. It's no surprise that RHEL gets picked by the big software manufacturers as the one distro they support. It's just impossible to support all of Linux in a way that doesn't require the end user to be prepared to do a lot of command line administration.
Apple Mac isn't a bad option, except they've really dropped the ball on their hardware. Mac books, iMacs and Mac Pros are very antiquated these days. Mac Pro is now, what, 4 Intel CPU and 5 GPU generations behind the curve?
Microsoft have left a yawning chasm of an opportunity for Apple to supply Just a Desktop OS (tm) on decent hardware that isn't an Ad platform. OS-X has yet to succumb to ad funded trend being pursued by MS with Win 10. If Apple update their kit, I'm sorely tempted.
"It's just impossible to support all of Linux in a way that doesn't require the end user to be prepared to do a lot of command line administration."
Sorry, but that's not not my experience. I install OpenSUSE every year or two as a new release come out, administer it with the GUI tools and it just works. I also have a lot of Raspberry Pis networked together - now they are a more work due to the lighter weight desktops and the more experimental uses I put them to but still most admin. is done with the GUI tools.
The idea that MS wants people to abandon Windows is the only one that really makes any sense in light of their recent behavior. It's been noted that MS only gets ~10% of their profit from Windows, and no doubt this is forecast to decline. With the support and development costs of Windows being quite high and relatively fixed, it's possible that they have predicted Windows to be a money loser within a few years. In light of this and their cloud-first aspirations, it's possible they are seeking an exit from the general-purpose OS market, and this is their exit strategy.
Of course, MS could simply decide to quit without the shenanigans, but then what? They're still on hook to support 7 for three more years, 8.1 for six more, and 10 for about eight more. Unless they spin off the Windows division to another company, it's not a burden they can easily dispose of. In addition, their monopoly in the PC market is an asset of tremendous (but declining) value, and to simply cast it away would be violating their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders.
If that's what MS is doing, they will continue to "monetize" Windows however they can. They will be converting the remaining good will of their customer base to cash in doing so... but even then, there are issues of inertia and vendor lock-in to keep the customers in the line of fire. Only when nearly all of the customers get so exasperated that they see no other choice than to leave Windows will MS have fully extracted and liquidated all remaining value from their OS monopoly.
My guess is that at this point, they'd sell Windows to another company, obligations and all, or spin it off into a new company. They could do that now, but I am guessing their forecasts indicate they'd make more money "monetizing" Windows customers now and selling the desiccated husk of what was Windows afterwards.
Nothing else really makes any sense to me as an explanation of how MS is managing to alienate so many of their customers so quickly. If they really want to remain in the OS business, this is a very strange way of showing it.
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I hate what Microsoft are doing with Windows 10 and, although I'm using it now, I'm actively looking to switch away. In the history of Windows, the OS stayed essentially the same and updates only fixed bugs and occasionally added small features. If I didn't like the way things like Windows ME or Windows 8 did things, I could just choose to skip that OS and wait to see what the next version is like. Now, Microsoft can just say "Hey, you know that update we just installed without giving you a choice? We made major UI changes and there's nothing you can do about it". I went through that crap on the Xbox 360 with them changing the interface completely and I had no choice.
Well, they're not doing that to me any longer. It's MY computer and I should choose which software and which version runs on it. Not Microsoft. I'm going to leave my current PC as a gaming PC and use Steam streaming to play games from it on the new mid-level Linux PC I'm about to build. If software and games publishers took Microsoft's cock out of their mouth and made more of a push to Linux for gaming, they could sound the death knell of Windows with a decade.
I can see how this will pan out
You bung Windows 10 on a machine, install a 3rd party product, hit a problem and call up for support.
Support: Which OS/version version are you using ?
Customer: clackity clack. um, it's Windows 10, 21st April 2017 09:05:03 AM edition with .Net 25.19.3421.231554
Oh, hang on, no it's just updated to 10:05:15 edition and it's rebooting,
Windows is updating your computer
Support: Sorry, we only support Windows 10, 1st April 2016 15:45:23 edition. With .Net 22.123.4322.94763
Well with the frequency of updates and shortness of the 'support period', I don't see the need for the MS support organisation, just use Cortana to route all support calls directly to the relevant developers, reward said developers as per call centre staff. A small company I worked for back in the 1980's did this, did wonders for code quality, documentation and developers respect for support staff.
As for Office365, does anyone else experience every single desktop getting logged out and forgetting their credentials?
Anyone else experienced having every account in a company scrambled, licenses randomly reassigned between accounts?
Happens about quarterly. Luckily small business with around 20 users, and luckily I'm not the one that has to sort out the mess when suddenly nobody's excel will run.
Yes. Happened twice now.
I think Microsoft is trying desperately to encourage me to just give up and phone up Discount/Value Licensing and buy a bunch of old office VLK's and axe 365.
Which is weird, since I thought they'd intended to get me to migrate the remaining old VLK's to 365 rather than vice versa, but hey.
Next week, based on the feedback of Fortune 500 CIO's, who will, in no uncertain words, explain that forced yearly Windows updates == full-company RHEL desktop rollout, we will be surprised with the new Windows 10 LTS. (Enterprise SKU only, of course. Not for you, lowly Windows Professional peon.)
And who can conceive what unfathomable wonders Microsoft policies will bring two weeks from now?
re: "we do not support drivers for hardware more than 3 years old from time of first sale"
Already encounter this to some extent, with component manufacturers, saying xyz is out of support, you need to get support from whoever built the board/system with their component integrated into it.
Now that Microsoft has got a large number of machines being upgraded when it wants it can start to roll out code that breaks other systems; be they those who are still running old versions of Microsoft Windows (ie not 10) or those who run non Microsoft operating systems or applications. Eg Linux or LibreOffice. They roll out applications that handle a new file or wire protocol in March and then make it default in September, removing use of old protocols next March, so software more than 1 year old will then not interoperate with the latest stuff.
They will claim that this is all in the name of progress or fixing security vulnerabilities; but the real reason will that they will start saying how non Microsoft software is incompatible, not good enough, ... So LibreOffice (and similar) developers will have to waste a lot of time playing catch up while Microsoft sniggers.
Other software vendors play this game, eg Autocad is continually updating file formats which makes it hard for users of old versions to read files from a user of the latest versions.
This will also help with forcing people to take out a subscription: no subscription so you don't get the latest Microsoft Word ...
"start to roll out code that breaks other systems; be they those who are still running old versions of Microsoft Windows (ie not 10) or those who run non Microsoft operating systems or applications. Eg Linux "
Eh ? (Please explain how they're going to break Linux)
"How about change details of the SMB protocol and thus mounting of SMB shares no longer works."
didn't that happen already, with some of the newer Active Directory [insert profanity here] back when Micro-shaft first added all that? Good thing NT4 domains still worked for XP. Samba eventually got it all working anyway, despite them.
So if Micro-shaft decides to play those games, they've already got a history of losing that particular strategy.
"How about change details of the SMB protocol and thus mounting of SMB shares no longer works."
As part of their getting out from under a monopoly investigation they had to make undertakings about publishing that to Samba will be able to track it easily.
"Now that Microsoft has got a large number of machines being upgraded when it wants it can start to roll out code that breaks other systems"
That used to be their MO except that "other systems" were previous versions of Office. Then they had a panic attack when Open Office formats became ISO standards. Big organisations like specifying ISO standards so they were in danger of seeing OO formats being specified by customers. They reacted by getting their own "me too" ISO standard. That left them stuck - they couldn't play the old game any more and it also left their own formats a sitting duck for OO, LO, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and All to work on.
So I don't see quite how they can revert to the old game as you suggest although, of course, Charles Simonyi has re-entered the building... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/18/microsoft_charles_simonyi_intentional_software/
I knew MS was good at shooting themselves in the foot, and getting (a lot) better at it ever since W10 ...
...but this isn't just "accidentally" shooting yourself in the foot anymore, this is more akin to pulling pins from hand grenades and intentionally dropping them at your feet!
I can't even think of a better way for MS to lose the desktop market advantage they had - this might end up driving adoption of thin clients (and face it, a console or phone/tablet is really a (moderately smart but still very dependent) thin client connecting to a server farm elsewhere) so very hard.
My work laptop still refuses to install the Anniversary update. It secretly keeps trying to in the background but gives itself away then it throws up a 'Can't install updates' blue box that steals focus and refuses to give me control until I click the 'More Info' box.
None of the solutions offered by MS have worked and they have helpfully suggested I backup my personal data and then nuke the machine and start again...
Will that be their advice to anybody, twice yearly, who can't get an update to install?
My work laptop still refuses to install the Anniversary update.
That's most probably because you are running a third-party AV product, such as Norton - which <sarcasm> because Win10 is so secure compared to previous versions of Windows is unnecessary </sarcasm>.
None of the solutions offered by MS have worked and they have helpfully suggested I backup my personal data and then nuke the machine and start again...
Will that be their advice to anybody, twice yearly, who can't get an update to install?
I've got a Win10 tablet which has had to be factory reset to allow a clean install and update to the major releases - the "Creators" update being installed now is the third time since last November I've had to do this...
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