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Future Holds Large Updates Instead of Stand-Alone Windows Releases 199

Posted by samzenpus from the new-way-of-doing-things dept.
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.
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Future Holds Large Updates Instead of Stand-Alone Windows Releases More

Future Holds Large Updates Instead of Stand-Alone Windows Releases

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  • Enterprise Turnover? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @02:02AM (#49644989)

    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: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 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: (Score:3, Informative)

        by c2me2 ( 2202232 )
        This is total anti-Microsoft FUD. You are simply making shit up, and ignoring what the press releases have publicly committed to. It's NOT a subscription model.

    • Re:Enterprise Turnover? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @02:40AM (#49645097)
      Considering some stuff in use where I work which will not even run in Win8 yet I suppose it's a matter of only patching up to two or three years behind the current date. Yes that is stupid but that's the speed (or lack thereof) of development with some software.

      • Considering some stuff in use where I work which will not even run in Win8 yet I suppose it's a matter of only patching up to two or three years behind the current date. Yes that is stupid but that's the speed (or lack thereof) of development with some software.

        Unless, of course, the future plan is to make Windows always up to date with the ability to launch virtual machines with whatever "version" of Windows an old program might require.

        If it runs on the "new" Windows, wonderful. If you need XP, fine, if you need 7, fine... that can be provided in a sandbox for each program.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dbIII ( 701233 )
          Considering the state of "XP mode" now I can't see any MS support of such an idea as being any better than the kludge of using Virtualbox today. Something library based along the lines of WINE to run the old stuff is also possible but I really don't think they'll get any commercial payoff so I cannot see them bothering.
          So IMHO the "future plan" is to ignore the problem and expect anyone with the problem to sort it out themselves.

          • Considering the state of "XP mode" now I can't see any MS support of such an idea as being any better than the kludge of using Virtualbox today.

            You might be right... however...

            XP Mode was developed 7+ years ago under Balmer... MS today is clearly a different company...

            Time will tell...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dbIII ( 701233 )

              XP Mode was developed 7+ years ago under Balmer... MS today is clearly a different company...

              Actually that's my theory as to why every second version of an MS operating system is fucked up in some way - learning curve after they've gotten rid of the staff who got the last one right.
              MS should have a lot of 60 year old project leads and 40 year old developers at the "foreman" level by now, but they don't so there's a lot of wheel re-invention going on by people out of their depth.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )

      how are they going to keep up with major Windows changes every few months?

      They are going to have a full time compatibility group as part of their helpdesk. That's what was done in the 1990s, helpdesk was always working on the next version of upgrades and the staffed around it. Enterprises had to be upgrading their upgrading their applications regularly. The staff (remember this was staff not consultants) associated with the internal applications had to be prepping for the next versions and removing com

    • From what I've seen, every time you reboot Windows, a "large update" seems to be applied.

      Updating 5 of 27. Please do not turn off your computer.

    • I wonder that too. I can recall the heady days of Windows where smart admins would test updates on a system with all their software to see what it broke and how to fix it.
      >
      But the versioning can't be an worse than Ubuntu lately. Constant updates. I understand it's to correct functional and security issues. But perhaps once every couple weeks?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @08:12AM (#49646161)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Not to worry. We'll just stay on XP.

      Signed, your CIO.

    • 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?

      I work for a company that sells and develops Add-On products for Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision).

      They have moved to a MONTHLY "Cumulative Update" model, and are obviously deprecating the idea of "big yearly releases" (with the occasional, "voluntary", "Hotfix" or "Cumulative Update") that they have used for years.

      It's no fun.

      So, when Windows 10 goes this same way, we will have a situation where the OS is constantly in-flux, and the Applications (like NAV) are also constantly in-flux, with t

  • How are they going to charge for this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @02:22AM (#49645053)
    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? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @02:52AM (#49645123) Journal
      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?)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        (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?)

        Most of those shitting on it was comparing it to win2k, because of the less business-like interface and online activation. Of course most of those weren't running a legit license since 2k was a "professional" and not "consumer" OS. I don't recall anybody suggesting 98 - and particularly not ME - being better than XP. By 2010, Win2k was EOL, so it's not like you had much other choice if you wanted to run Windows and be supported. And they'd actually improved a lot of things, since XP pro was the current OS f

        • Most of those shitting on it was comparing it to win2k, because of the less business-like interface and online activation.

          Microsoft's own "XP Pro Corporate" did nice for those people who wanted no activation, nor even a need to crack it :).

          I was really pissed off by XP though, because it fucked up DOS games. 98 gave you everything at once : full sound (including adlib), no glitches, joystick input, networking in DOS games

      • There seems to b general hate for subscription models here on ./ but they actually make sense. When selling software a single purchase, the maintenance of that becomes a pure cost so there isn't incentive to do things like fix security holes (see the recent discussion on Android fragmentation). I know, for-profit companies should do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Single-purchase also facilitates piracy. Whether we like it or not, piracy is problematic exactly because those systems don't get upd

      • 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?

        It's almost as if they improved Windows XP over the span of a decade.

        Nah, that couldn't be it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shione ( 666388 )

      You're right it does cost money but I think they could still make it available for free. They could run it like the xbox model where the console makes a loss but they make the money back on other things. On the pc they could make a loss on the os and then try to make the money back through a 30% cut on everything sold on the windows app store. Sorta like how Google pays for the upkeep of Android from the app store sales.

      For this to really work though, ms would have to break windows compatibility and force a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      The way I see it, MIcrosoft wasn't making that much money from consumers on version updates. Almost nobody buys a box copy of Windows to do the upgrade. They just upgrade when they buy a new computer. It's always been rather expensive and the past few versions of Windows have had additional barriers to entry (annoying changes to the UI for instance) to further discourage people from updating. With this system your new "made entirely of ribbons" OS interface is just a Windows Update away.
    • Since they're mostly going to be pushing updates/versions/whatever to phones, I expect that they'll do a deal with carriers to only download immense files, and to do so when you're roaming on 3G somewhere out of network. The carriers will make a mint on data overages and in exchange, they'll kick something back to MSFT. You won't like it, but what choice will you have?

  • Bypassing consumer resistance to poor design (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BooleanJulian ( 1388441 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @02:36AM (#49645083)

    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: (Score:2)

      by SumDog ( 466607 )

      Wait, what was wrong with MSDOS 4?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by shione ( 666388 )

        MSDOS 4.0 had multi tasking but it wasn't very good so ms released 4.1 with the mulitasking removed.

        • That has got to be a very obscure branch, wiki says it's unrelated to MS-DOS 4.00 and 4.01 released later. MS-DOS 4.00 and 4.01 are semi-obscure on their own, they're known as a disaster from some bugs. All DOS games from the 90s (at least those on 1.44MB 3.5") either said on the box they required DOS 3.3 or DOS 5.0.

    • People will actually gain the right to vote with their wallets in this model. Until now, everyone would get their Windows with every new PC. Hey, it was already there and the cost was in the price of the machine. So, why should Joe Average look for something else? If MS switches to a subscription model, I would love to see you explain to your grandmother that she will now have to cough up a montly allowance for MS so that she can Skype with her family or do whatever it is that grandmothers do with their PCs

  • Someday in the future Windows will decide that none of your software is compatible with an update, uninstall it all, be unable to update it due to circular dependencies and then spend 30 hours of your netbook's time and all of its batteries recompiling the Kernel.

  • Yeah, right. We've also heard that from Adobe about their Creative Suite switching over the Creative Cloud. All we've gotten instead is more and more new bugs in each release, and without failure, new DRM failures with each and every release. How are we supposed to trust Microsoft with the same thing, when they already royally fucked up Windows 8? How can we trust them to not simply pull an Adobe, and spend all their time developing new DRM that constantly fucks up, instead of new actual features and functi

    • You assume screwing you while taking your money isn't the intended end goal.

    • Never had CC DRM fail. Don't know anyone who has had a license problem with CC. Do you even have Creative Cloud or are you just listening to the people who heard it from someone who heard it from someone who thinks CS6 is good enough?

      What I have seen is that Adobe now releases a RED SDK update on a regular schedule instead of waiting 12 months for them to support the latest R3D features.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        Yeah, I've had no problems with Adobe CC either. Don't know what people are bitching about.

  • As long as one of those 'big updates' put the Windows 7 UI back in place and disposes of all that new Metro or whatever it's called these days junk then I'll be happy.
  • Now we know why they skipped Windows 9: it's so that when they call future versions Windows 10.1, Windows 10.2, etc., it won't sound like they're so far behind Apple.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dracos ( 107777 )

      That would also infer that Win10 is built on a BSD-like kernel.

      Um.... Half-Life 3 confirmed?

  • Windows X with point releases? Wow, that sounds original.

    Maybe they'll give the point releases the names of animals or something to distinguish them from each other.

    • Exactly. From now on, no more version numbers greater than 10.
      So they'll have Windows 10.1 - 10.10, then they'll continue numbering at 10.10.1 - 10.10.10, then it's 10.10.10.1 etc.
      Until the Windows version string gets to be more than 256 bytes long and the version checking code breaks.

    • Now we know the real reason they skipped Windows 9 and went right to 10. Is there anything they don't copy from Apple?

  • "Ah, here's your problem. This program won't run on Windows; you'll need to upgrade to Windows."
  • There is future for Windows. Really?

    The power balance has shifted a lot, The Personal Computer is morphing into Corporate Computer. People buying with their own money are now going towards smartphones, tablets, chromebook like light platforms. Even corporations are using tablets in a big way. The servers have gone to Linux. Windows is being forced to inter-operate with other devices without having the advantage of being the de-facto monopoly.

    When corporations are the only customers, they are able to ext

  • For most companies and individuals, Windows 7 is probably the end of the line. Even WinXP is plenty good for most people, and the need to upgrade because of hardware obsolescence vanished some 5 years ago already. Lucky for Microsoft they can extort money from Android vendors, because Windows is not going to be a huge cash cow going forward.

    • Every software vendor has dreamed of a subscription based model and how with the internet and DRM they can start to realize those goals.

      Didn't MS buy windows365 or some domains like that last year?

      You know they will never give it away for free; they will charge you for your habit. (not ruling out their past behavior of giving free or massive discounts to get people addicted.)

  • So how much space are all of these updates going to take? Are they going to magically be 5x as big as the download once installed. It bugs me that Win7 needs 30gig of my SSD.

    I though the idea of Dynamic linked libraries was shared code to save space, I get the impression that over 90% of code is not used and there are multiple copies of multiple versions of each DLL. The system doesn't work, you might aw well just compile the code you need and scrap DLLs.

  • They will just providing updates until it becomes Windows XP again.
  • Since it is always Windows 10 from here on out, then please come up with a way to differentiate versions:
    * Windows OS X Mountn' Lyin
    * WIndows OS X Leo Pard
    * Windows OS X Snowl E'pard
    etc

    This will not only help differentiate versions, but will demonstrate Microsoft's Leadership and Originality.

  • It's about time (Score:3)

    by morgauxo ( 974071 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @08:32AM (#49646315)

    I've been using a rolling release of Linux for years. The whole concept of having to start over when a new version comes out seems so antiquated.

    On the other hand.. I don't see how this can work for a closed, comercial product unless they can sell people on the subscription model. I'd say that would be a tough sell but then again.. people buy crappy hardware that needs replaced in a year or two. People subscribe to access libraries of movies and music rather than permanently buy recordings. Maybe it's only a tough sell to me.

  • Microsoft Windows OS X! Then they can have versions 10.1, 10.2, et cetera. Maybe name the releases after animals!

  • certifications? Data security? (Score:3)

    by dAzED1 ( 33635 ) on Friday May 08, 2015 @10:54AM (#49647611) Journal
    Do none of these folks care about certifications? It's already hard enough to get Windows reasonably secure yet still have software work on it. When you get X certified, you certify it to work in Y situation. The stupid rolling release crap makes that impossible. "Fast" versus "slow?" How about "give me security updates to product X which is certified" versus "give me features and major backend changes in the same stream as the security updates." Yes, it makes it cheaper for the company to wrap everything up together - means they only maintain a single branch. Yay Mozilla for unleashing that laziness upon the world.

  • Did they run out of enough real jobs that they had to invent "developer evangelist"?

  • In 2020, installing Windows will include having to download 500GB of patches requiring several reboots. Windows 8.1 currently requires downloading tons of patches, and there is still no service pack for Windows 7, the most widely used version of Windows.

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