With more than 10 million participants, Microsoft’s consumer Insider program has successfully engaged with fans and built a global test platform to learn how people really use computers. But there’s one big flaw in the program: It’s been for consumers, not for enterprises—until now.
There’s likely a good reason for the Insider program’s historic consumer focus: How can a business work with untested and untried software that’s not known to have bugs, including many that aren’t even identified at this stage? Enterprise IT is all about minimizing risk, not bringing new risk into the organization, so the consumer focus of the Insider program makes practical sense.
But enterprises are big business for Microsoft, and their needs are different than those of consumers. Enterprises use different software and hardware, and they run PCs in a very different manner. Where home users have PCs that at most access workplace joins for a minimal level of management, PCs in corporate fleets are controlled by Active Directory and System Center, locked down and managed to keep valuable data safe. Then there are applications: At home they’re usually off-the-shelf software, while in businesses there’s a mix of purchased and custom code.
Taking code as it comes is risky, even as new development models and tools have reduced the kinds of Windows Update breakages that my InfoWorld colleague Woody Leonhard regularly chronicles. IT teams have long memories, and given past breakages it’s not surprising that many organizations lag even the current branch for business where they’ve begun Windows 10 migrations.