>To support Windows 10 devices in these mission critical customer environments we will provide Long Term Servicing branches at the appropriate time intervals. On these branches, customer devices will receive the level of enterprise support expected for the mission critical systems, keeping systems more secure with the latest security and critical updates, while minimizing change by not delivering new features for the duration of mainstream (five years) and extended support (five years). On Long Term Servicing branches, customers will have the flexibility to deliver security updates and fixes via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) which allows full control over the internal distribution of updates using existing management solutions such as System Center Configuration Manager or to receive these updates automatically via Windows Update

http://blogs.windows.com/business/2015/01/30/windows-10-for-...

That sounds like Ubuntu's support policy!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

Where do you think these open source companies got the idea for long-term support policies from in the first place? Microsoft and IBM had been selling software and supporting for enough length of time that these things became necessary long before OSS projects caught up.

I think there will be some problems, but I don't think it will be that bad. The web has coped perfectly fine with continuously-updated browsers.

A significant proportion of 'change management' is pointless, box-ticking bureaucracy and achieves nothing. Just look at any large company's mostly semi-broken IT systems!

Critical infrastructure probably shouldn't be running on desktop Windows anyway, so it's not going to affected. At the other end of the spectrum, if Bob in Marketing's copy of Microsoft Word stops working for a day or two while Microsoft patches something - well, who cares. Hopefully the benefits from a rolling-release system will outweigh that.

Hopefully continuously-updated operating systems will encourage enterprise software vendors to avoid using undocumented/non-standard features, and we'll all be better off.

The problem isn't that Bob in Marketing's box doesn't work for a few days. It's that Bob (along with 90% of everyone over 25) hates user interface changes and works slower the first two-three months after a change. If MS starts throwing changes at him every 6 months that's a 15-20% decrease in Bob's productivity.

Maybe a continuous flow of changes will ingrain the process of adapting to changes into them a little more.

It'll inure them to the cost, but it won't make it any cheaper.

On the other hand you could see it as simply spreading out the changes you would get from major updates every few years.

Incremental changes to the OS may only impose a small cognitive burden of adapting at any given time instead of presenting a seemingly insurmountable obstacle all at once.

Frog and a boiling pot of water.

Frogs try to jump out of boiling water. I understand you mean it metaphorically, but like the expression "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" it has no scientific basis.

I did assume that the reader is familiar with the metaphor irrespective of its truthfulness.

"Darmok and Jalad... at Tanagra."

Do you catch more flies with rotting flesh than with sterilised water?

> if Bob in Marketing's copy of Microsoft Word stops working for a day or two while Microsoft patches something

Why would such a problem only hit one user, in a place that rolls out an SOE?

Okay, that was a bad example. It's likely to be small, obscure features that break (assuming that major stuff will be caught by good automated testing). Not many people will rely on that specific functionality, so not many people will be affected.