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The Windows 10 October 2018 Update has been plagued by trouble.
In September 2017, Microsoft boasted that it had just released the "best version of Windows 10 ever." A year later, as Windows engineers struggle with the most recent release of the flagship operating system, there's a compelling case that the October 2018 Update is the worst version of Windows 10 ever.
The month was almost triumphantly for Microsoft, with the announcement on October 2 that its second Windows 10 release of the year, version 1809, was ready for delivery to the public, right on schedule. Then, just days later, the company took the unpredictable action of pulling the October 2018 Update from its servers while it investigated a serious, data-destroying bug.
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An embarrassing drip-drip-drip of additional high-profile. Built-in support for Zip files is not working properly. A keyboard driver caused some HP devices to crash with a Blue Screen of Death. Some system fonts are broken. Intel pushed the wrong audio driver through Windows Update, rendering some systems suddenly silent. Your laptop's display might be arbitrarily reset.
And with November fast approaching, the feature update still has not been re-released.
What went wrong? My ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley suggests Microsoft is so focused on new features that it's losing track of reliability and fundamentals. At Ars Technica, Peter Bright argues that the Windows development process is fundamentally flawed.
Or maybe there's an even simpler explanation.
I suspect a large part of the blame comes down to Microsoft's overreliance on one of the greatest management principles of the last half-century or so: "What gets measured gets done." That's certainly a good guiding principle for any organization, but it also leads to a trap for any manager who does not consider what's not being measured.
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For Windows 10, a huge number of performance and reliability events are measured constantly on every Windows 10 PC. These streams of diagnostic data come from the Connected User Experience and Telemetry component, aka the Universal Telemetry Client. And there's no doubt that Microsoft is using this telemetry to improve the fundamentals of Windows 10.
In that September 2017 post blog, for example, Microsoft brags that it improved battery life by 17 percent in Microsoft Edge, made 13 percent faster, and saw an 18 percent reduction in users hitting "some system stability issues." All that data as a greater reliability, as measured by a dramatically reduced volume of calls to Microsoft's support lines:
Our internal customer support teams are reporting significant reductions in call and online support request volumes since the Anniversary Update. During this time, we've seen a healthy decline in monthly support volumes, most notably with installation and troubleshooting.
Microsoft has been very much focused on monitoring telemetry dashboard, monitoring metrics like installation rates, boot times, and number of crashes. On those measures of reliability and performance, Windows 10 is unquestionably better than any of its predecessors.
Unfortunately, that focus has been so intense that the company missed what I call "soft errors," where everything looks perfectly fine on the telemetry dashboard and every action returns a success event when the result is anything but successful.
Telemetry is most effective at gathering data to diagnose crashes and hangs. It provides great feedback for developers looking for fine-tune performance of Windows apps and features. It can be a great job of pinpointing third-party drivers that are not behaving properly.
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Aim telemetry fails miserably at detecting anything that is not a crash or an unambiguous failure. In theory, those low-volume, high-impact issues should be flagged by the Windows Insider Program in the Feedback Hub. And indeed, there were multiple bug reports from the Windows Insider Program, a few months ago, flagging the issue that caused some data to be lost during some upgrades. There were also multiple reports that should have been taken into consideration.
So why were those reports missed? If you've spent time in the Feedback Hub, you know that the quality of reporting varies wildly. As one of the Windows engineers complained to me, "We have so many issues reported daily that we are changing the subject of sucks, you guys should die that it is hard to spot the six upvotes we have a real problem that we can not repro house. "
In response to those missed alarms, Microsoft has added a new field to its problem reporting tool.
Windows users can now see the problem report by severity.
Time will tell if that will help you if you will be overworked every time. Even with that change, the recent problems have been highlighted in the Windows Insider Program: Its members are not trained in the art of software testing.
The real value of Insider Preview builds is not surprisingly, capturing telemetry data from a much larger population of hardware than Microsoft can test in-house. As for those manual feedback reports, I'm skeptical that even an extra layer of filtering will be enough to turn them into actionable data.
Ultimately, if Microsoft is going to require most of its non-Enterprise customers to install feature-updates, it's a redmond. The two most serious bugs in this cycle, both of which wound up in a released product, were caused by a change in the fundamental working of a feature.
Also: Top ten features in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update TechRepublic
An experienced software tester could have had these issues. A good test knows that testing edge cases matters. A developer has to be able to meet the requirements of a certain number of times and to consider the possibility of having a feature in a unintended way.
Sometime in the next few days, Microsoft will re-release the October 2018 Update, and everything in the Windows-as-a-service world will return to normal. But come next April, when the 19H1 version is approaching public release, a lot of people will be holding their breath.
Related links
Windows 10 telemetry secrets: Where, when, and why Microsoft collects your data
How does Windows 10 telemetry really work? It's not a secret. I've gone through the documentation and gone out where, when, and why. If you're concerned about private documents accidentally leaving your network, you might want to turn the telemetry setting down.
Two Windows 10 feature updates a year is too many
Opinion: The idea of delivering two full Windows 10 upgrades every year sounds great on paper. In practice, the Windows 10 upgrade has been unnecessarily disruptive, especially to home users who do not have the technical skills to deal with them.
Windows 10 1809 bungle: We will not miss early again reports reports, says Microsoft
Microsoft makes changes to its Windows Update after failing to update early October 10, 2008 Update.
Microsoft halts rollout of Windows 10 October 2018 Update: What happens next?
Only days after releasing its latest feature update to Windows 10, Microsoft has broken the deadlock of the newer version of its download as it investigates "isolated reports" of a data-destroying bug. What should you do now?
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