Handling Frequent Updates In The Enterprise World

Mitch Tulloch raises a concern over how large enterprises would react to Microsoft moving to more regular, iterative releases. The answer for large enterprise who can’t handle releases coming out more often than once every six years or so is to only update when they are ready instead of every time there’s a new release.

With Apple, this isn’t a great option because Apple don’t have very long support periods for older OS’s, but that’s not the case with Microsoft – a legacy of the fact that they deal with large enterprise and Apple in general does not. Companies that were running Windows 95 would only have reached the point of having to upgrade, what, a year or two ago? That’s easily more than the required six years between upgrades.

So if enterprises won’t upgrade anyway, why would Microsoft want to release more regularly? Well for a start it avoids the embarrassment of huge schedule slippage like with Vista and more importantly, it would help keep Microsoft competitive in the consumer market – something that is very slowly moving away from Microsoft. That’s not to suggest that Microsoft will lose it’s commanding lead in the OS market or that you should expect Apple’s market share to suddenly jump. However, Microsoft is clearly under increasing competitive pressure that would be relieved with more frequent releases.