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When Microsoft was still building Windows 10, it launched the Windows Insider program to push fast and slow updates to customers who were also willing to serve as beta testers. Today, the company declared this approach was both inspired by Xbox and has created a network of 10 million “fans” that help test Windows via the Insider Preview program and the fast and slow rings within it.
Corporate VP Yusuf Mehdi wrote a LinkedIn post describing how this new approach has worked for the company. The quote is long, but worth reading in full:
Any fan-centric company should treat that as just the starting point. In fact, every interaction with the customer after that is more important and should build a deeper relationship. Customers should feel like they have joined a community – a family. Don’t be a faceless company. Enable your fans to interact with real people at your company, people who are fans themselves…
A fan is not only going to tell you what they think, but they are going to expect to hear back, to see you take action on their feedback. If you create the right connection it is not a token effort of outreach, rather it becomes the very way you build products and communicate about your progress. If you create a real community then the best thing happens: fans take it over and they drive the process connecting with each other and assuming your product as their own. It can be an incredible experience to see it happen, but you have to commit to the responsibility 24 x 7 x 365. We have had one of these unbelievable experiences with our Windows 10 Insider program. We count over 10M Windows Insiders today, many of them fans, who test and use the latest build of Windows 10 on a daily basis.
What are they smoking in Redmond?
My first reaction to this declaration of amazing fan-driven support is best summarized as follows:
Every time Microsoft releases a new operating system, there are a certain number of people who are going to dislike it because they mistake the familiar for the objectively superior. There’s even a term for it — cognitive lock-in. Windows 10 is just like every previous version of Windows in this regard, but with one significant difference: The specific issues that people dislike about Windows 10 often aren’t linked to its GUI or its implementation. What people hate about Windows 10 is the user-tracking, the mandatory telemetry-gathering, and the various ham-fisted ways Microsoft has taken over what used to be user-controlled options.
What’s most striking about these problems is how simple they would be for the company to fix. Most of the technical users who are unhappy with these decisions would be fine with diving into menus to turn off features. I’m comfortable using gpedit.msc to make low-level changes to the operating system. I’d be fine if Microsoft set telemetry gathering to “on” by default, but offered the option to turn it off. Heck, I’d be happy if they just sold a version of the OS with these features deactivated that didn’t require an Enterprise license. But they don’t.
Mehdi’s claim that Microsoft has moved to some kind of magic, fan-loving paradise doesn’t pass muster. The company’s claim to always be learning from fans is insulting given the ways it has previously claimed to “learn” from its users. If you take Microsoft’s word for it, the company never learned the following, despite decades in the computing business:
- Customers, especially enterprise customers, like patch notes;
- Users do not like malware-style upgrade campaigns;
- Customers want control over telemetry gathering;
- People hate having their hardware rebooted without warning;
- Users hate having their systems upgraded without warning;
- Customers do not like having very little control over non-security updates, like drivers or features;
- Users do not like seeing ads in File Explorer;
- Customers do not like ads for Edge in their system tray.
It is farcical for Microsoft to pretend that it’s built a new and better Windows based on listening to what fans want when Windows 10, to date, has been two middle fingers shoved in the air at tusers who want some modicum of control over what data their machine shares and how it shares it. What really makes the situation hilarious is that Mehdi appears to actually believe his own codswallop.
Windows Insider doesn’t catch a lot of bugs
The other problem with Microsoft’s Windows Insider program is more concrete. Since Windows 10 shipped, we’ve seen a number of very specific bugs make it into various major updates. These bugs have often been linked to specific peripherals, whether it’s using multiple monitors, BSODs when a Kindle is plugged in, broken PowerShell, critical bugs in virtualization security, or the company’s decision to strip out the H.264 compression algorithm that the vast majority of webcams used with its Anniversary Update last summer.
Why are so many of these bugs slipping through the cracks? Microsoft doesn’t recommend testing Insider Previews on your daily driver (for good reason). But this means the majority of testing actually takes place within virtual machines (VMs). Most VMs don’t concern themselves with supporting USB peripherals, at least not beyond the minimal level required to interface with a device. Testing virtualization within an already-virtualized OS might make for interesting Inception layers (if you’re a really geeky person, anyway), but how many people practically test software in this fashion? If the patterns we’ve seen are any indication, not many. And since Microsoft fired a significant percentage of the QA team that used to be responsible for finding and fixing these bugs, it’s not catching them internally the way it used to.
If you want to “surprise and delight” customers, Mr. Mehdi, there’s an easy way to do it: Start giving customers the options to control telemetry and updates, hire some actual dedicated QA people rather than asking programmers to test their own software, and above all, stop pretending like you haven’t run a software company before. Either the lines of communication within Microsoft are so poor that the people who knew all of the decisions mentioned above would be awful never managed to get that critical information to people higher in the food chain, or you knew all along that your program changes would be loathed and decided you simply didn’t care. If you want to take that approach, fine — God knows, it certainly works for Apple — but stop batting your eyes and claiming to have been educated by us “fans.”
That would be surprising and delightful. It’s also not going to happen.
