Comment New rapid release cycle? (Score 5, Insightful) 251
Our company has a Premier Support account manager at Microsoft, and I can't even get a straight answer out of him, so either the communications are really screwed up about this or they're being very tight-lipped.
I'm guessing that this is part of their new "no frozen releases" cloud-enabled release cycle. It's no secret that Microsoft wants people off the on-premises software because they want to collect recurring revenue. Constantly rolling in new features is going to be the way they get customers used to the idea. Apple does it with iOS, and most people (consumers) are comfortable with constantly-changing software. Businesses are a whole different story.
I still am trying to figure out how Microsoft is going to support enterprise customers with the constant release of patches plus feature changes. (August's Internet Explorer patch broke Java on enterprise desktops, and while it's a good idea for consumers who never update the bug-ridden JRE, it makes for a lot of headaches. There is no end to crappy IE-only, JRE 1.4-only, hastily thrown together "enterprise" Java applets.) Speaking as an end user computing person, targeting master images around SP1 of an OS release has been a pretty good standard. Service Packs or at least Update Rollups have been a convenient point to stop the integration work at, make all the desktop apps hang together, and concentrate on regression testing of patches. Without these big milestones anymore, it's going to get harder to roll out a stable platform for people.
Microsoft's in an interesting spot. They could just ignore business customers and force everyone onto the cloud, which I doubt they'll do right away. I also doubt they'll have the courage to backtrack and give people back all the features in Windows 7. However small it is, they now have a whole App Store ecosystem to support, and it's apparently going to be even more important since they're merging Windows and Windows Phone. Whatever happens, I'm sure someone has said that Windows 9 is going to have to be a huge hit with both the desktop and the tablet crowd. 8.1 is now usable with keyboard and mouse...hopefully Windows 9 will allow desktop-only users to not have to switch between Metro and desktop to do things like use the control panel. I hear the Charms thing is going away-- that's a huge help for desktop users. I think if Microsoft actually listened to customers, then they'll be in a good spot. Traditional desktop users don't want change as drastic as the 7-to-8 transition -- you have to introduce stuff like this slowly. Everyone hated the Ribbon in Office 2007, and some people still do, but most people are used to it now.
I think my #1 feature request would be to put Aero Glass back into the OS, plus better theme support in general. The 2D Windows 2.x look is really awful if you're not on a tablet. The OS under the hood is actually quite good...unfortunately performance and stability enhancements don't sell licenses.