Windows 10 is being presented as an operating system in continuous development. We’re used to
cloud services being a work in progress, but how well does that transfer to an operating system
Windows 10 isn’t just a new
operating system; it’s also a new
way of delivering an operating
system. In theory, Windows as a Service (as
Microsoft calls it) promises a continuous
stream of new features alongside the familiar
security updates, instead of saving up new
features for three years and then trying to
persuade users those features are worth the
cost of an upgrade. (And no, Windows as a
Service is not a paid subscription service,
unless you’re a business paying for upgrade
rights with Software Assurance.)
“This is increasingly the way the industry
is heading,” says Gabriel Aul (pictured right),
corporate vice president for the Engineering
Systems team in the Windows and Devices
group at Microsoft. “It’s by no means isolated
to technology companies. For example,
you even see automotive companies like
Tesla using a services model to provide
new benefits to customers. We saw it as
a natural evolution for Windows
Microsoft has been using the services
model for years with its regular security
updates, Aul says, and Windows 10 lets the
company take it to a new level. “We really
do believe Windows 10 is the best Windows
ever, and embracing a services model lets
us keep making the experience even better
with additional productivity, safety and
entertainment value offered over time
That’s the theory. But even before
Windows 10 shipped, there was considerable
pushback against the new Windows as a
Service model – and especially against using
different branches to deliver updates at
different speeds, such as Current Branch
(CB) for consumers, who will get update
downloads as soon as they occur without
the option to postpone them, and Current
Branch for Business (CBB) for businesses
that want to delay updates (but still without
the option to postpone them indefinitely
However, while a great deal of attention
has been given to concerns that Microsoft’s
new service policy gives you “updates
whether you want them or not,” there’s been
much less discussion of other implications
of this approach. What this means when it
comes to features that have been delayed or
even downgraded (sometimes temporarily
sometimes not) before they get updated.
In the process of Microsoft redesigning
the operating system, some features
have gone away (sometimes temporarily).
For example, the new Edge web browser
has fewer capabilities than Internet
Explorer users have known for years.
And new features in Windows 10 weren’t
all ready on day one; instead, they’ll
keep arriving over the coming months. For most users, the November ‘autumn
update’ was the first instalment.
This is a new approach for operating
systems, but it’s something that’s been
‘business as usual’ for years from cloud
services such as Gmail, as well as for
mobile apps. Until it sought to appeal
to businesses with Google Apps, Google
services were notorious for staying in
beta as the company continued to develop
them, and Microsoft Office 365 has added
features regularly. “Doing this at the
operating system level is definitely harder
than for a cloud-based service,” Aul admits,
“but we think the model makes sense and
we’re committed to making it a smooth and
low-friction process for customers.”
Even so, it’s not clear how willing business
users are to make that transition.
Stepping back or starting small?
In some cases, making the Windows
experience ‘even better’ has first meant
taking a step back and even removing
features. Or, as Aul phrases it, “We believe
this approach will allow us to deliver better
features on a sustained cadence, but some
things will start small and grow as we add
capability to them.”
With both Windows Mobile and the Edge
browser, that step back was inevitable,
because Microsoft started from scratch.
It meant previews of the mobile version
of Windows 10 began by being far behind
what Microsoft was already shipping with
Windows Phone 8.1. Early previews lacked
features such as the ability to open Office
documents, and even now the new Mail
and Calendar apps don’t offer significantly
more functionality than the Windows Phone
equivalents. In addition, the Windows Store
no longer allows users to send apps to their
phone from their PC; they have to load the
apps directly from the Store on their phone.
That ‘step back to move forward’
process may not always be comfortable,
but the belief at Microsoft seems to be
that the sacrifices will be worthwhile once
the operating system reaches the ‘moving
forward’ stage. For example, shifting to
a common operating system has allowed
Windows phones to get the Edge browser
and the same universal apps as Windows 10.
In particular, Microsoft seems to be
hoping it will reach the single, unified
messaging system it’s been working
toward for both PCs and phones. Over
the past few years, Microsoft dropped
Windows Messenger; it also integrated
and then removed Facebook messaging
(after Facebook removed the APIs to
support that). With Windows 10, Microsoft
can integrate Skype messages with SMS
and Skype calling with the Phone dialler;
and with Cortana on both phones and PCs,
users will see missed calls and be able to
send text messages from their PCs. The
first rudimentary pieces of this arrived in
the autumn update.
Aul paints the development of Edge as a
shift to implementing more web standards.
“Consumers want a browser that takes full
advantage of the modern web and new
features in Windows 10, but Internet Explorer
still plays an important role for some
enterprise customers who require a legacy
browser. With Windows 10, we’re delivering
experiences for the modern web and new
apps, while still helping existing customers
who may need more time to transition.”
However, although Edge supports the
latest HTML standards, it has fewer features
as a browser than Internet Explorer, Chrome
or Firefox. It’s only in the fall update that
Edge added the abilities to synch Favorites,
to upload files by dragging them into a
browser window, to download files to a
specific folder and to stream video from
the browser to other devices – features IE
has had since Windows 7. The update added
a thumbnail preview for tabs, but that
only works inside the browser; the taskbar
preview still works only for the active tab,
so you can’t close individual tabs from the
taskbar thumbnail as you can in IE. You
can’t pin specific sites to the taskbar either,
and you can only re-open the most recently
closed tab without digging into your history.
The promised extension support
(which replaces the IE model of plugins for
everything except Flash) that was expected
in 2015 is delayed until some time in 2016;
according to Microsoft, it’s still “actively
working to develop a secure extension
model.” And even though Windows Mobile
will bring the Edge browser to phones,
they won’t get extensions as quickly as the
Windows 10 browser (something that would
have put Windows phones ahead of Android).
Troubles for OneDrive
Another area where Windows 10 has taken
a step forward and a step back is OneDrive.
The OneDrive for Business client has finally
advanced from the clunky SharePoint and
Groove technology, and it synchs as reliably
as the popular OneDrive consumer service.
But the consumer version of OneDrive
in Windows 10 lost the sophisticated
placeholder feature from Windows 8.1,
which let users work with files through
Explorer, whether or not they were locally
synced – because according to Microsoft
that feature confused some users and
caused storage problems on small
Windows tablets. Users can still pick which
folders they want to sync, but doing so
requires they use a separate dialog rather
than choose directly from Explorer.
Sharing OneDrive files directly from
Explorer has also taken a step forward (the
Explorer option no longer takes you to the
OneDrive site to get the link) and backwards
(the feature moves from the Ribbon to the
context menu and shares a link that allows
editing by default, not just viewing).
It hasn’t helped that Microsoft recently
announced that Office 365 users will no
longer have unlimited OneDrive cloud
storage and fees for OneDrive would be
revamped. Is Microsoft listening to user
views on functionality when it makes these
changes? As you’d expect, Aul says yes.
Our metric for success is delivering
a product that people use and love.” he
argues. “We have a team of data scientists
who rigorously pore over data and
feedback from Insiders, and customers to
understand the features or changes they
want to see in the product, and to help the
engineering team build out road maps for
product development.”
It’s a little harder to see from the outside
what the feedback looks like, because the
Windows Feedback app is now the only
official way to report bugs and request
features. Although Microsoft is keeping its
more public UserVoice sites for developer
features, including the rendering engine in
Edge, it’s closing down the UserVoice sites
for Windows 10.
And users may not always feel that
Microsoft is listening. For example, when
Microsoft announced in January 2015 that
it was removing the ‘placeholders’ that
allowed OneDrive users to access all their
files using a minimum of local drive space,
Chris Jones, who was then corporate vice
present for OneDrive and SharePoint,
stated that “other [important capabilities]
will come in updates that follow later in
the calendar year – most notably the core
capabilities of placeholders that are both
reliable and comprehensible.” But there
has been no follow-up. More recently,
reductions in OneDrive storage allowances
precipitated a petition drive.
Building differently to build faster
Delivering major features more quickly –
which is the core of turning Windows into
a service – means Microsoft must build it
differently, Aul explains.
“Moving at this pace requires we build
and test in smaller incremental steps than
in the past, and test and evaluate the
results quickly as we go,” he reveals. “This
represents a huge effort and we use stateof-
the-art test automation, as well as good
old-fashioned dogfooding to find issues
quickly and create a tight feedback loop
back to developers making changes.”
Aul suggests that building Windows
differently will also result in better
applications for the latest version,
“because third-party developers will be
able to focus their energy on one up-todate
operating system target rather than
a fragmented installed base.”
Depending on Insiders
The testing goes beyond what Microsoft can
do alone. “The key advance for us has been
adding the millions of Windows Insiders who
are contributing to the testing and feedback
process,” he says, “which allows us to ensure
coverage of new updates for quality and
compatibility before they ship broadly.”
According to Aul, testing on so many
PCs helps Microsoft to balance the delivery
of new features with stability and usability.
With the Windows Insiders’ help, since
the release of Windows 10 in July, he says
Microsoft has found and fixed “tens of
thousands of issues” in preview builds.
Aul also credits the Insider program
Aul also credits the Insider program
with allowing Microsoft to “test and make
improvements at a much faster pace” and
claims Microsoft is responding to feedback
more quickly. “In contrast with how Windows
has been released in the past, getting
new features out quickly to customers to
start using and giving us early feedback
allows us to respond quickly and tune the
experiences as needed.” That includes the
company’s recent promise to give more
details about what changes are included
in specific updates (although that came
after a Windows MVP started a petition
on Change.org rather than sticking with
Microsoft’s own UserVoice forums).
The autumn 2015 update (codenamed
Threshold 2) rolled up the improvements
Microsoft had been making since July,
continued the subtle interface changes to
make the design more consistent and added
a host of small extras and options, such as
automatically switching time zones when you
travel. It also brought back some Windows
8 touch features, such as being able to
resize two applications at the same time,
and offered the first steps for integrated
messaging, with previews of the apps for
messages, video and voice calls
Adapting to Windows as a Service
Continuous delivery is likely to become
the norm for Microsoft software. In
addition to Windows 10 and Microsoft’s
Configuration Manager, Office 2016 has
the same service model. It even uses the
terminology of Current Branch and Current
Branch for Business. It also has the same
requirement: users must take regular
updates to stay supported.
All this doesn’t seem to be holding back
Windows 10 adoption – for the most part.
Just one month after release Microsoft
claimed on its blog that the new OS was
already installed on more than 75 million
PCs. And in a survey conducted in May
2015 by Spiceworks, 96 percent of 500 IT
professionals said they were interested in
Windows 10, and 60 percent said their IT
department was already evaluating it.
The two biggest reasons those IT
professionals gave were the Start button
and the free upgrade, followed by security
improvements. The faster update cycle
and the new Edge browser only made sixth
and seventh place on the list.
Iain Chidgey, vice president at Delphix,
which creates Data as a Service software,
says that Windows as a Service is part of
a sea change going on in technology – one
that businesses need to take advantage
of. “The likes of Apple and Android OS are
already steaming ahead with a continuous
delivery model; organisations need to accept
Microsoft’s latest change and jump in with
both feet to avoid missing the boa
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