There’s one thing about releasing more frequent (and free) OS upgrades and patches but major version upgrades ($$$) should offer customers something more compelling. Apple is a smaller more nimble company than Microsoft and it makes sense for them to produce major upgrades more frequently than Microsoft, but I don’t even think they should offer major upgrades as frequently.

Alas, the ink is still wet on Vista and apparently the next version of Windows is already well underway and could be here as soon as 2009.

at the RSA Conference this week, Ben Fathi (Corporate Vice President of Development with Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division) indicated that rather than a five-year interval, we should be looking at half that:

At PC World, the original source article, Fathi teases a little more:

According to Fathi, that’s still being worked out. “We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”

Call me a stick in the mud on this or worse but I don’t want to see major OS upgrades every couple years. I’m happy with a minimum five year upgrade cycle. From what I’ve seen and experienced so far with Vista I’d rather wait 10 years and 10 billion bones for Microsoft to hit the dance floor again.

Make it compelling and worthwhile to upgrade. Understand that upgrading can be a real hassle, not really a major benefit for your customers, Microsoft. In 2.5 years I seriously doubt we’ll have all our machines running Vista. Will you, kind reader, in your home and business?

This major upgrade stuff is a game that AOL has played for years and the source of irritation. I could make a compelling argument that AOL software has never improved that much from v3.0 and here they are over v10.0 v9.0 because …?

What about you? Do you want major OS upgrades less or more frequently? What do you think is a good OS lifecycle? Five years seems like the bare bones minimum life cycle to me. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t keep patching and offering incremental free upgrades along the way.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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