Editorializing

Offered for your consideration, two different headlines about the same story.

Start with this headline from the normally quite sober WCCFTech:

Microsoft Promises, Microsoft Delivers! Windows Installation Time Reduced to 30 Minutes

compare it to Gizmodo UK's headline about the same announcement:

Windows Has a Plan to Make Its Update System a Little Less Garbage

and marvel at the power of editorial direction. The same phenomenon can be seen at work in the articles themselves.

Again, start with WCCFTech:

Only last month we saw Dona Sarkar responding to a tweet that was complaining about Windows’ download and installation time. It appears the company has really been focusing on improving this process, as Microsoft has just announced reducing the time it takes to install Windows 10 feature updates to an average of 30 minutes instead of an average 82 minutes that it took to install the Creators Update. [This doesn’t apply to Patch Tuesday updates that usually don’t take this long.]

Microsoft: You will now be able to install Windows 10 updates in under 30 minutes

In a blog post, Microsoft details how it has managed to improve Windows update model by keeping most of the process “online” instead of offline – referring to the installation period when a PC can’t be used. Joseph Conway, Senior Program Manager on the Windows Fundamentals team, explained this in detail:

To achieve this, we moved portions of the work done during the offline phases and placed it in the online phase. Because of these changes, the average offline time for the Fall Creator’s Update released last October has dropped to 51 minutes, a 38% improvement! But we didn’t stop there. We’ve done additional work in the upcoming Windows release to move portions of migration operations to the online phase as well. This has resulted in an overall reduction of offline time when installing builds in the Insiders Program to an average of 30 minutes. That’s a reduction of 63% from the Creators Update!

No emphasis was added by me, BTW. That big, bold text in the middle really does appear in the original article, something which is depressingly normal in all kinds of articles. The entire article, though, is basically just quoting the PR message from Microsoft, amplifying the message that Redmond have decided to push here. It's not so much journalism as stenography: 100% hype.

Now, compare that to Gizmodo UK's take on exactly the same announcement:

Installing updates on Windows has always been a pain in the ass. Not only does Microsoft seem hellbent on forcing users to update their machines whether they want to or not—including in prior versions of Windows 10 a nightmare “feature” that forcibly seized control of users’ systems to start the installation process—the process is infamously slow. The combination of these factors can make updating a Windows machine feel less like a minor but necessary inconvenience than a suddenly imposed tug-of-war for control of a computer.

Fortunately, Microsoft is now mulling ways to make the process less painful. Per Ars Technica, in a recent blog post the company announced that it expects changes to the way Windows will handle forthcoming updates to result in substantial performance improvements. Specifically, Microsoft is adjusting the amount of labour that Windows Update will perform in its “online” and “offline” stages.

[...]

In the blog post, Microsoft explained that by moving some initial parts of the offline stage to the online one, it reduced the offline phase from a workload-crushing average time of 82 minutes in the April 2017 Creators Update to 51 minutes in the October 2017 Fall Creators Update. In an as-of-yet unnamed update expected for April, the company predicted it will have gotten the entire offline phase down to around a half an hour, a 63 percent reduction from a year prior.

The changes do mean the update will take longer overall, though Microsoft wrote users are unlikely to notice the increased time spent in the online phase of updating.

“... This should not be noticeable to most users, as the setup processes run at a low priority, so they won’t have a large impact on a device’s battery life or system performance,” Microsoft concluded.

See the difference? How Gizmodo UK actually explained what the changes are, how and why they're expected to work, and even pointed out that updates will now take longer, overall, even as they result in less downtime? How they, yes, still quote Microsoft, but don't make that Microsoft quote into the entire focus of their article? Those are the signs that someone's taken time to actually dig into the facts behind this announcement and understand them, instead of just pumping out a story that repeats MS's talking points to get the story posted as quickly as possible, with the most click-bait-y headline they could think of ("First!"). It's journalism, rather than hype.

Gizmodo UK did a pretty good job on this one, so kudos to them. On the other hand, I have to say I'm a little disappointed in WCCFTech on this one. For an outlet whose name literally stands for Where Consumers Come First, they're not really putting consumers first with coverage like this.

However, if you want to know not only how the hype cycle works, but why, then the stark contrast between these two approaches to exactly the same story illustrates it pretty clearly.

For the record, I am not inclined to give Microsoft even the modicum of praise that Gizmodo UK gives them ("it’s nice to see Microsoft putting some effort into making this process less annoying"). Windows 10's forced update regime is wrong in so many ways, and the fact that they're working to make it less intrusive doesn't do much to mitigate the fact that they're leaving it in place, in my opinion. After all, as Gizmodo UK point out, "Some of Windows’ competitors are better at handling big updates without rebooting—Linux, for example, doesn’t lock in-use files the way Windows does, meaning more updates can be processed on the fly." WX doesn't have to be this way.