On release cycles and deprecating stuff

From “What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider’s Retrospective” by Ben Fathi:

The three year release cycle meant we rarely knew what the competitive landscape and external ecosystem would look like when we started a release […] What we thought we knew three or four years ago when we planned a given OS release was laughably outdated and sometimes flat out wrong when the product finally shipped.

The best thing we could have done was to enable incremental and friction-free delivery of new cloud based services to an ever-simplifying device. Instead, we kept adding features to an existing client-based monolithic system that required many months of testing before each release, slowing us down just when we needed to speed up.

This is precisely what I love about the web: you can have multiple releases on a (more than) daily basis, pushing out small incremental changes.
The end user always has the latest version.

Thankfully we’ve also moved this way when it comes to software: things like evergreen browsers which update themselves, and automated build pipelines continuously delivering changes to your test and end users (think of your Facebook/Instagram apps updating on a bi-weekly basis) are common nowadays.

When it comes to an OS and/or software libraries it becomes more complicated though. As Ben put it:

We didn’t dare remove old pieces of functionality which were needed in the name of compatibility by applications already running on previous releases of Windows.

I especially like how the React team is handling these kind of breaking changes: a feature is first marked as deprecated for 2 release cycles before it is actually removed, giving you – the developer using it – the time to adapt:

Of course it’s not really fair comparing OSes to React: developers using React can opt-in to upgrade to a new version. When it comes to an OS it’s the user – not the developer – that decides to upgrade or not. However, if you’re making software for a living you should prepare yourself for things like this (knowing that breaking changes in OSes are prevented as much as possible) and build things as Future Friendly as possible.

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Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

Unless noted otherwise, the contents of this post are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License and code samples are licensed under the MIT License

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