Windows 10 update
When will Microsoft release the first major update to Windows 10, asks
No-one really knows except the people at the company’s headquarters in Redmond. Fortunately for outsiders, even the short stretch of Windows 10’s life so far offers clues about Microsoft’s process.
Background information
Microsoft has purposefully been vague in describing the intervals between releases to the ‘Current Branch’ (CB), one of four update-and-release tracks and the one all consumers and many small businesses will live on. That’s no surprise: Under a ‘service’ rather than ‘software’ model – and Microsoft has been firm in the ‘Windows as a service’ description of 10 – timing is supposed to depend much more on the quality of a release than what it actually contains, and strictly speaking, should not be pinned to a hard-and-fast deadline. Again, the quality of the update should supersede the calendar.
But Microsoft has talked of Windows 10’s update cadence, if only because the new scheme is a massive change from decades of prior custom, and it still needs to provide users, particularly those in enterprises, with some structure.
Until recently, Microsoft talked up a three-times-a-year update tempo, with new features and functionality, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) changes, on the table every four months. Lately, though, Microsoft has become rather vague about that frequency. In a detailed explanation of Windows 10’s servicing, Microsoft said it “expects to publish an average of two to three new feature upgrades per year.”
Under the three-times-annual plan, Microsoft should ship the first update to the Current Branch around late November, four months after Windows 10’s 29 July RTM.
Patch Tuesday
One clue suggests a date after 12 November, the month’s Patch Tuesday release of Microsoft’s security fixes. In both September and October, Microsoft packaged that month’s Patch Tuesday security fixes within a new build for users on the Insider ‘fast’ track. Insider is the preview program that lets people install early versions of Windows 10. In Microsoft’s lexicon, a ‘ring’ is a subset of an update track.
On multiple PCs running the Insider (beta) versions of Windows 10 and assigned to the fast ring, builds were received and installed Another tidbit pulled from Microsoft’s pattern so far also indicates that the first major update – which has been dubbed ‘Threshold 2’, with Microsoft using the abbreviation ‘TH2’ in its build labelling – is not imminent.
Last month, Microsoft shipped build 10565 to the fast ring (12 October), offered the same build as disk images in .iso format (15 October), and then delivered it to those on the Insider slow ring (16 October).
Gregg Keizer