Increasing Microsoft’s Agility With Windows Blue.

Microsoft’s flagship product, Windows, isn’t exactly known for it’s rapid release cycle. Sure for things like patches, security updates, etc. they’re probably one of the most responsive companies out there. The underlying operating system however is updated much less frequently with the base feature set being largely the same for the current 3 year product life cycle. In the past that was pretty much sufficient as the massive third party application market for Windows made up for anything that might have been lacking. Customers are increasingly looking for more fully featured platforms however and whilst Windows 8 is a step in the right direction it had the potential to start lagging behind its other, more frequently updated brethren.

Had Windows 8 stayed as a pure desktop OS this wouldn’t be a problem as the 3 year product cycle fit in perfectly with their largest customer base: the enterprise. Since Windows 8 will now form the basis of every Microsoft platform (or at least the core WinRT framework) they’re now playing in the same realm as iOS and Android. Platform updates for these two operating systems happen far more frequently and should Microsoft want to continue playing in this field they will have to adapt more rapidly. Up until recently I didn’t really know how Microsoft was planning to accomplish this but it seems they’ve had something in development for a while now.

Windows Blue is shaping up to be the first feature pack for Windows 8, scheduled for release sometimes toward the end of this year. It’s also the umbrella term for similar updates happening across the entire Microsoft platform around the same time including their online services like Outlook.com and SkyDrive. This will be the first release of what will become a yearly platform update that will bring new features to Windows and its surrounding ecosystem. It will not be in lieu of the traditional platform updates however as there are still plans to deliver Windows 9 on the same 3 year cycle that we’ve seen for the past 2 Windows releases.

Whilst much of the press has been around the leaked Blue build and what that means for the Windows platform it seems that this dedication to faster product cycles goes far deeper. Microsoft has shifted its development mentality away from it’s traditional iterative process to a continuous development process, a no small feat for a company of this magnitude. Thus we should expect the entire Microsoft ecosystem, not just Windows, to see a similarly rapid pace of development. They had already done this with their cloud offerings (as it seems to gain new features every year) and the success they saw there has been the catalyst for applying it to the rest of the their product suites.

Microsoft has remained largely unchallenged in the desktop PC space for the better part of 2 decades but the increasing power of mobile devices has begun to erode their core business. They have then made the smart move to start competing in that space with an unified architecture that will enable a seamless experience across all platforms. The missing piece of the puzzle was their ability to rapidly iterate on said platform like the majority of their rivals were, something which the Blue wave of products will begin to rectify. Whether it will be enough to pull up some of their worse performing platforms (Windows Phone) will remain to be seen however, but I’m sure we can agree that it will be beneficial, both for Microsoft and us as consumers.