Office Updates: Weighing Currency vs. Cadence

  • 2 August 2013
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GrayKnowlton 1 Aug 2013 2:55 PM
 
Customers give us a lot of feedback. We depend on that feedback to improve the quality of our products.
Since I joined our release management team 3 years ago, we have been operating with a mantra that our updates will improve the quality of the product over time. We continuously strive to make the product more stable, more secure, more performant.
At this moment the software updates business is at a crossroads. Where we used to have Patch Tuesday, and our working model was a rhythmic, slow cadence of small updates, we're seeing the emergence of frequent, large updates delivered to many of our computing experiences. The most striking examples are the rapidity of single or few-instance services which are continually updating and refining in response to feedback and incidents within the service, as well as the rich game clients that force you to be current with updates to log into the server and play.
This mode of hyper-currency has great benefit to provider and to consumer. In many cases the rapid update cadence is paired with an aggressive, Agile development methodology which forbids / reduces bug backlog. Thus the time from discovery to resolution can be very short if the backlog is of a manageable size. Fixing bugs delights customers. Doing it faster is a good thing for everyone.
 
Except...
 
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This doesn't sound good here is a comment from a fellow MVP.
 
There's an interesting shift going on under our feet - more so in the consumer side of the world. Office 365/2013 offerings get released with a "click to run" deployment. This means that while the use the MU engine, there are no patches to approve. They just get installed.
 
Which begs the question - what happens when there's an update that doesn't work for you? You can't uninstall it.
 
Daniel 😠

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