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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft’s plan to focus on Windows 11 fundamentals is a good first step
- A crucial next step is to reform the Windows Insider Program
- More transparency about design decisions will help, too
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Microsoft releases a new version of Windows packed with new features and abrupt departures from the familiar user interface, launching it with great fanfare. Customers respond with a combination of “Meh” and “Do not like” and “Ugh.” In response, the CEO makes some management changes, and the new leaders promise to get back to fundamentals and deliver what those customers have been asking for.
Am I describing the reaction to Windows Vista? Windows 8? Windows 11? The correct answer, of course, is “All of the above.”
Also: Microsoft announces sweeping Windows changes – but no apologies
In this latest installment of the Windows break-fix saga, Microsoft’s Pavan Davaluri, President of the Windows + Devices business, wrote an open letter to Windows Insiders (and, by extension, to the billion-plus customers running public releases), emphasizing the company’s “commitment to quality.”
The letter was long on aspirational goals but short on concrete deliverables. Still, it was a step in the right direction.
Making Windows 11 more responsive and consistent? Yes, please. Improving the baseline reliability of the OS, drivers, and apps and making the Windows Update experience more predictable, with clearer control over restarts? Absolutely. Being “more intentional” about how and where Copilot AI features are shoehorned into Windows? Finally!
Also: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a total disaster
We should start seeing the first examples of those initiatives in the next few weeks. As long as Microsoft is in active listening mode, I’d like to offer some specific suggestions on how it can deliver on those lofty promises.
1. Make preview builds useful again
It’s no accident that Davuluri’s open letter was addressed to members of the Windows Insider Program. By definition, those are some of Microsoft’s best customers, the ones who are most likely to provide useful feedback and to try the product in real-world use cases that won’t show up in a testing lab.
Last November, I wrote a brief history of the Windows Insider Program, calling out my frustration with its gradual deterioration in recent years. If you’re looking for a reason why Windows 11 development has felt disjointed and out-of-sync with customers, this is probably the place to start.
Also: The Windows Insider Program is a confusing mess
A dozen years ago, at the start of the Windows 10 development cycle, Microsoft launched the Insider program. It was a very big deal, because it gave corporate customers, trainers, and enthusiasts a chance to try out a new Windows version in the months before it shipped. With a few million testers contributing bug reports and telemetry, there was a pretty decent chance that serious bugs would be squashed quickly, before they escaped into the world.
That all ended in 2022, when the various Insider channels (Release Preview, Beta, Dev, and Canary) became disconnected from public releases. My humble suggestion? Bring back those connections.
- The Beta channel should be a preview of the next H2 feature update, with monthly releases that gradually get more polished as the ship date approaches.
- The Release Preview channel should be a preview of what’s about to ship to the public, with the goal of allowing admins to test an upcoming release to identify any problems before deploying it widely.
- Leave the experimentation to the Dev and Canary channels, which don’t have to be tied to a specific release.
That doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.
2. Decouple quality testing from feature testing
One of the most profoundly counterproductive moves that the Windows 11 developers made was to turn the Insider Program into a giant A-B test for new features. The documentation for a freshly released build might spotlight a new feature or a change in the user interface, but not every tester would see it. The result was mass confusion.
Also: I’ve been studying Windows telemetry for a decade – here’s the only setting I turn off
If my goal is to stress-test the quality of a Windows build, this inconsistency drives me crazy. If my goal is to understand what’s coming in the next version of Windows, this inconsistency also drives me crazy.
To work around that gatekeeping, some Insiders use an unofficial, open-source command-line utility called ViVeTool, which toggles these hidden experimental features on and off.
So why not allow testers who want to tinker with features to opt in to A-B testing? You could even document the features that each Insider who opts in is testing, with the option to switch from version A to B and back again?
3. Ditch Controlled Feature Rollout in public releases
If you and I both install the latest public release of Windows on hardware that is functionally the same, we should have an identical experience, right?
Sorry, that’s not the way things work anymore, thanks to Microsoft’s “continuous innovation” initiative and a technology called “Controlled Feature Rollout.”
Here’s how Microsoft describes that technology:
Microsoft is committed to delivering continuous innovation by releasing new features and enhancements into Windows 11 more frequently … using the existing Windows monthly update process. Our phased and measured approach may introduce new features using Controlled Feature Rollout (CFR) technology¹, which is also used in the Windows Insider Program and with Microsoft Edge.
Follow that footnote, and you get this explanation:
¹Using CFR, features may be gradually rolled out, starting with devices that install the monthly optional non-security preview release. When we’ve validated that each feature is ready, we’ll gradually roll it out to new devices, and eventually include it enabled-by-default in a subsequent monthly security update.
As I pointed out last November, the goal behind Controlled Feature Rollout seems rational — making sure changes don’t disrupt work for people running released versions of Windows. But isn’t that the point of the entire Insider program? Doesn’t Controlled Feature Rollout mean that every customer running a released version of Windows is now a member of yet another test channel? So why do my two PCs running the current public release of Windows 11 have different Start menu layouts? If I am a corporate trainer, how am I supposed to tell the people in my class that some of them have a different set of features than their peers and I have no idea when their version will change?
And as long as I’m asking questions, why are new features being rolled out in what is now called a security update?
If you can’t reliably deliver a feature to every customer, it’s not ready for public release. Make those public builds work the same for everyone, as long as the hardware supports it. If two machines running the same build of Windows 11 are side by side, they should have the same features available to them.
4. Disclose more of the ‘why’ behind decisions
When Steven Sinofsky took over as head of Windows development after the disappointing and chaotic Windows Vista release, one of the things he introduced was a blog called “Engineering Windows 7” — or E7, for short. It was published from August 2008 through February 2010. (A mostly complete copy is available on the Internet Archive, courtesy of Sinofsky, for those who are curious.)
Those pages have long since been purged from Microsoft’s servers, but this unsigned post from 2008 on the Windows Experience blog somehow survived:
The Engineering Windows 7 blog is designed to create an open discussion about how we’re making the next version of Windows – currently codenamed Windows 7 – and to create a background of understanding for the engineering decisions made in order to ship Windows 7. [emphasis in original]
Engineering the next version of the most used operating system to-date is a very complex software project. Why? Because Windows has a very large user base and that user base is very diverse. Planning the next version of Windows (and ultimately developing it) is a huge under-taking as it requires Microsoft to learn and understand the needs for all types of customers that use Windows today. On the Engineering Windows 7 Blog, you can expect a two way discussion on how those customer needs are balanced out to deliver Windows 7 into the hands of customers.
The one thing you won’t find on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog is major product announcements. The focus is to simply discuss the engineering of Windows 7.
The E7 blog was genuinely revolutionary, with detailed discussions from engineers and product designers of why they made decisions on how to build what became Windows 7. It was also refreshingly free of the marketing-speak that defines so much of what gets published on Microsoft’s Windows blogs today. Most importantly, that blog accomplished something crucial: It spoke directly to skeptical customers who were convinced that Microsoft had changed their favorite feature for purely arbitrary reasons.
If the people building Windows want to convince customers that they’re listening to feedback, bring back that level of technical transparency. Just tell the marketing people to keep their hands off it.