Microsoft's new/old Windows Phone update policy keeps customers in the dark

Microsoft has published a new Windows Phone update, build 8107, to resolve a problem where the soft keyboard sometimes disappears, leaving users no way to type anything on the phone. The bug can affect any handset on any carrier, so it?should be rolled out to everyone as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn't willing to say who will actually receive the update, or when.

During the troubled rollout of the NoDo update, the company published a useful guide to tell users how far through the approval and deployment process their particular combination of handset and carrier were, allowing them to have a good idea when each upgrade would be available.

This added valuable transparency to a process that has been more complex than we would like?a result of carriers' ability to block the delivery of updates for any reason (or no reason at all).

However, in a blog post announcing the new patch (or rather, confirming: the update had already started to roll out some days previously) on Friday, Eric Hautala, General Manager of "Customer Experience Engineering" at Microsoft, said that going forward, the company would no longer provide such detailed information. Major feature updates would still be publicised, but minor patches?security updates, stability improvements, bug fixes?would now be secret. There would be no posts to the Windows Phone blog to announce their availability and no updates to the published schedule to inform users of when they'd actually be able to install the update.

New/old

This isn't a new policy as such; it's the same policy that the company used when it launched the operating system. But the response has been uniformly and consistently hostile. Windows Phone users want to know what patches are out there, and they want to know when their mobile operators are stiffing them.

At the end of 2011, former Microsoft employee Charlie Kindel made the argument that consumer-favoring decisions?tight regulation of carrier crapware, uniform hardware specifications and hence good software compatibility, centralized operating system upgades?were hindering Windows Phone's acceptance among network operators. The carriers were denied the ability to remove features they didn't like and to put their own stamp on the software.

The ability to bar updates was perhaps the biggest obvious concession that Microsoft made to the phone networks; while it was far from the sole cause of the NoDo issues (a software failure to check for free disk space before performing the update, and Samsung's decision to silently ship two different hardware versions of its Focus were also big issues), it was one of the most aggravating. Being denied an update because it's not compatible with your phone hardware is frustrating, but understandable?it's better to have no update than a bricked phone. Being denied an update because your mobile operator can't be bothered to sign off on it is a whole lot more annoying: there was no technical reason for the delays, just mobile operators making a nuisance of themselves.

In the wake of the NoDo issues, we were concerned by this very problem, but the swift and universal roll-out of the major Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" upgrade did a lot to convince us that the procedural problems were all fixed. It appears that our hope was misguided.

The entire rationale for carrier testing and approval is unclear, with Microsoft conceding that Apple doesn't bother asking for the mobile operators to test or approve iOS updates before shipping them. There's generally no benefit to consumers from giving carriers this kind of control, but as a minor concession to make the phone networks a little happier about the platform, it's understandable.

Keeping the availability and timing of updates secret similarly offers no benefit at all to consumers. Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott has opined that the decision to stop keeping customers in the know might even be a deliberate ploy to keep the carriers on-side by sparing them from embarrassment. Obviously, Microsoft can't afford to poison the various relationships it has with partners, so it's understandable that the company avoids making its its partners look bad even when they screw up?the company avoided pointing the finger at Yahoo! when Yahoo!'s broken mail servers caused excessive data usage, for instance, and it avoided calling out Samsung for its Focus hardware shenanigans.

But when an operator is refusing to allow distribution of a small, low-risk update that everyone needs, we think that perhaps it's the time to do the right thing by the users and let them know what's going on. Until every update goes as smoothly as the Mango update, Windows Phone customers deserve the extra information.

Source: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/everything/~3/15C7Ni9X7Bo/microsofts-newold-windows-phone-update-policy-keeps-customers-in-the-dark.ars

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