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Great article by Tom Warren at the Verge where he talks about Windows 10 and how it’s basically being rebuilt and turbo charged for businesses.
Even more interesting was his description of the plans that Microsoft have for pushing out more frequent and granular updates.
If Windows is continually being refreshed, it can be argued that this is a great thing because businesses don’t have to worry about being behind and it’s a more contemporary style of keeping software updated.
The article says in part:
Windows is now treated as a service at Microsoft, and the Windows 10 Technical Preview is a giant test of this model. If it all goes to plan, it means Microsoft will be able to push out updates to Windows in a matter of days.
It’s something the company is already doing with the Xbox One, but applying that work to Windows is far more complex. Microsoft has to balance the needs of consumers versus businesses who adopt versions of Windows at a slower pace for fear of breaking things.
At the end of the test, the future of Windows should look a lot like Chrome browser updates: fast, unobtrusive, and with lots of improvements.
The part that’s going to be really fascinating to me will be how is Microsoft going to balance rapid updating with due diligence and regression testing?
Windows is a huge business with billions of customers and millions of businesses depending on it.
One bad update or even a couple of bad updates could cripple thousands of PC’s around the world.
The major challenge with rapid updates is not just testing their sectional upgrade against the rest of Windows but trying to regression test against Windows + hundreds of popular third party apps.
So a scenario could be an upgrade is fine when made to Windows but when applied to Windows with Adobe Photoshop, it crashes.
This scenario has been a pretty interesting challenge for software in general. Redmond is taking this on and I for one look forward to seeing how they handle it.
source:theverge