From betanews:
Over on Ghacks, Martin Brinkmann posted his thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows 10 feature updates schedule. The software giant is committed to rolling out two major updates to Windows 10 every year. In April we had the Creators Update, and in a few months' time the Fall Creators Update will begin to roll out.
Martin asks if this rapid release schedule is such a wise idea, and he has a good point.
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Microsoft announces cool new features for future versions of Windows 10, but then doesn’t have the time to implement them because it’s committed to producing two major updates each year.
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But that’s only half the problem. The Creators Update roll out has been going on for nearly three months now, yet only a third of Windows 10 users are running it -- either because they haven’t yet been offered it, or because they’ve chosen not to install it.
It’s possible the roll out pace will accelerate from this month -- which will be in keeping with how the Anniversary Update roll out was managed -- but even so there will be people who won’t have the Creators Update, or will have only just received it, by the time the Fall Creators Update is made available.This lingering stink of repeated failure, with My People failing to make the Creators Update and Continuity/Timeline and Cloud Clipboard failing to make the Fall Creators Update (seriously, Microsoft, please hire someone who knows something about naming things) is looking more and more like the sort of issue that Paul Thurrott was predicting we'd see, as far back as October of last year, well before Microsoft announced their overly-aggressive updating schedule:
Microsoft’s goal with Windows as a Service was pure and well-intentioned. But it may never work. And after the tough past year or so, I’m not sure how Windows will absorb this hit. The only thing worse would be continuing down the current path and pretending that it’s working.Naturally, the "only thing worse" is exactly what Microsoft is doing, because of course it is. And part of this pretense is to also pretend that Timeline was never actually promised for Fall 2017. And that has not escaped Paul Thurrott's notice, either:
In the wake of Microsoft’s revelation that it will not ship Timeline in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, some are attempting to rewrite history, claiming that Microsoft was vague about when this feature might appear. But Timeline, along with other cross-device features, was explicitly promised for the Fall Creators Update.
"In our Fall Creators Update, for the first time, Windows PCs will love all your devices,” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said during the Build 2017 keynote at which he announced this functionality. (You can find this quote at the 48:44 mark if you’d like to hear it for yourself.) “Fluent design, Files on Demand, Timeline, Cloud-powered Clipboard, these are all ways that we’re going to make our users lives better.”
This statement seems pretty clear to me. And it stands in sharp contrast to the backpedaling that Belfiore and some Microsoft fanboys are doing now on Twitter.
“From my [point of view,] we described [a] set of features that would come starting with [the Fall Creators Update],” he tweeted. “And I thought we’d communicated uncertainty.”
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Is it possible that there is some equivocating or hedging on these features elsewhere in the Build 2017 keynote? Sure. I haven’t rewatched the full presentation. But I’ll just raise two issues here, one that should be obvious to all, and one that will be obvious in retrospect.
First, that statement above is pretty definitive. If Joe or others on the Windows team were more ambiguous elsewhere, that doesn’t undercut that the fact that he summarized his talk about those new features with the above statement.
Second, a few hundred members of the press and blogosphere were pre-briefed on the Build 2017 day 2 keynote contents the day before the presentation. And looking at my extensive notes from that day, I see that it is broadly about the new world view for Windows, the new strategy that I wrote about at the time. And more specifically, it focused on features that are coming in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Which I also wrote about at the time. No one ever said anything about these features rolling out over time.
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I’m not just being pedantic here. Communication is important, not just the words one uses, but the way in which those words are delivered. I feel it is disingenuous to make promises on a stage to your customers and then backpedal silently, using the limited audience on Twitter to spin a different story. Being honest isn’t always easy, but it’s almost always the right thing to do.
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It’s time for some clarity, Microsoft. What’s really going to be in the Fall Creators Update? Will any other features be dropped?In other words, is Microsoft's Windows-As-A-Service strategy actually working? Is it actually possible for Redmond to deliver two feature updates each year, on a regular schedule? Or were Microsoft biting off more than they could chew, when they promised they would?
The issues here are broader and more fundamental than the contents of the FCU. It goes to basic issues of reliability, of whether Microsoft is honestly telling us what they can actually deliver, or just hyping their product with a lot of empty promises on which they will continually fail to deliver. In an environment where the success of Windows 10 relies heavily on Microsoft winning over Windows 7 customers who mostly don't trust them anymore, their attempts to retcon the timeline of Timeline couldn't be any more ironic, but one can't help but feel that the irony is lost on Microsoft themselves.
Microsoft seem to be lost in their own hype cycle, arrogantly confident that customers will buy regardless of what they actually deliver. There's a reason why so many are refusing to join the brave new Windows 10 world; until Microsoft dedicate themselves to honesty, and to earning back their customers' trust, I don't expect that to change much.
UPDATE:
Although the furor had died down somewhat by the week-end, coverage continues on the Timeline story, including this very well-written piece by Michael Allison at mspoweruser:
The first problem I can see here is that Microsoft promised a feature, and it didn’t deliver it. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal, no one’s really going to use that people bar for more than five minutes anyway. On the other hand, this is a puzzling pattern over promising and under delivering. Microsoft has consistently shown off concepts of beautiful apps, features and updates that are frequently underwhelming when delivered, or delayed until no one cares anymore As normal users really aren’t reading the tech sites to learn what’s new with Windows, the only users who would be affected by those are the techies who spread word of mouth and do pay attention to this stuff. The next time Microsoft announces something, we can’t trust them for multiple reasons. We can’t trust that the images we’re being shown are representative images of what we’ll be seeing. We can’t trust that they’ll arrive in the promised timeline. And now, we can’t trust Microsoft to not pretend that they didn’t announce any timeline of any sort.
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What I hypothesise is that many times, Microsoft is padding its press events with features to make each release more attractive from a marketing perspective. Windows 10 is Microsoft’s only consumer-facing OS at the moment, and so the firm needs all the headlines it can get from sites willing to wring out every bit of news coverage they can from said press event (Yes. I know there’s room for self-reflection there.), hence we get briefings on Pick Up Where You Left off, Timeline, My People etcetera and prepare articles on how Microsoft’s new features will change the way we use your computer. The problem is, half of these features aren’t ready for prime-time by the time Microsoft announces them, so months later, the firm is left with a new problem. It can’t deliver what it’s promised and has to delay it to the next update. Of course, it can’t announce the same features it announced for the previous updates, so it’ll announce a few more features that won’t make the cut, but don’t worry, the next update will get it. And so on.
This is a problem that doesn’t need to exist as far as I can see. There is no legal force that is compelling Microsoft to push out two updates a year, this is an entirely self-imposed deadline. In addition, while these updates often feature packed, many of the features are irrelevant to the vast majority of users.There's a lot more to it, and the entire thing is well worth a read, and Allison does a very good job of highlighting the problem (i.e. increasing distrust of Microsoft), and proposing a very simple behaviour change that Microsoft could implement which might start to address it (i.e. honesty), but the part I liked best is actually the very last paragraph, which speaks more to the media's failings than to Microsoft's:
In a few months, Microsoft will announce a new version of Windows with the usual fanfare. There’ll be features galore, and they’ll aim to change the way you think about your PC – or so the marketing goes. Despite the critical pieces saturating the web at the moment, the firm need not worry, we’ll still have learned nothing by then.Clearly, some members of the tech media are aware of how their distractibility is contributing to the problem. Such signs of self-reflection are about as common as hens' teeth; in the spirit of rewarding good behaviour when it happens, please go and give the man some clicks, already.