Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has explained why the megacorp ditched its increasingly twee naming conventions for Windows 10 releases in favor of the blander H1 and H2.
The reason, according to Chen, was that Microsoft realized calling releases “Spring” and “Fall” didn’t make sense in all parts of the world. Not just the fact that “Fall” is a meaningless term in markets such as the UK, it was also that Spring in one part of the world was not necessarily Spring in another.
Chen explained that the issue came up during a meeting where Microsoft was mulling over whether it had any unconscious biases. “One of my colleagues raised his hand,” he said.
“He grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite from those in the Northern Hemisphere. He pointed out that naming the updates Spring and Fall shows a Northern Hemisphere bias and is not inclusive of our customers in the Southern Hemisphere.” And so the names were changed to the far more generic H1 and H2.
The change makes a lot of sense, although calling something the “Creators Update” – as was previosuly used between 2017 and 2018 – is probably a good deal friendlier to marketers than a letter and a number.
Microsoft still also churns out updates every month, some of which are left turned off to make the lives of administrators easier.
However, as announced in February 2021, Microsoft has since moved away from shipping two major feature updates of Windows per annum in favor of only one in the second half of each year when the Windows verson is changed. The next should be Windows 11 25H2, expected in September or Ocotber.
Chen’s story goes back to the days of Windows 10, when Microsoft was trying to show a more dynamic and exciting side. It took disasters such as the document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 Update for the company to realize that a more sober approach was needed.
Even if “the Update of the Damned” had a certain ring to it. ®