Woody, Paul Thurrott has a brief commentary on this subject as well, though he’s largely attributing the latest increase to a renaming of the Xbox testers group…

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/107833/now-10-million-windows-insiders

Apparently, there is no scarcity of demand to be an unpaid debugger. Sort of tells you why MS can be so arrogant and disregard all of them and more. Symbiosis between sadists and masochists. Sad success.

Yes, maybe it is the best marketing move. I drank the Koolaid at first and I thought it was a great idea, that we could really all contribute to create the best OS ever. But I soon found out not only people want very different things, but that Microsoft sometimes want very different things than most people.

“Overall, it seems that the Windows Insider Program had a profound impact on how Microsoft operates as a company. Microsoft has become much better at listening to its customers, and the program has already gave birth to similar initiatives such as the Office Insider Program, the Xbox Insider Program and the Skype Insider Program. All of these prove that crowdsourcing is not reserved to small startups, it can also work for technology giants like Microsoft, with great results.”

Has been much better at listening to its customers???

I wonder how many people congratulated them on some of the new features like preventing you from removing the lock screen or reserving some GPOs settings to Enterprise only, the inability to not use Cortana or the fact that it forces you to use Bing and Edge as default tools.

I registered for the insider program. I found real bugs or problems, I notified MS of them, I noticed a lot of similar feedback, but those bugs never got corrected. I didn’t feel like there was any point in doing that. Some issues were very easy to fix, some less but nonetheless important I think. I don’t use my insider account privilege at all no more. Do I still count as a Windows insider?

Maybe 10 millions people is a lot of people to listen to and what I feel is important doesn’t matter at all. Do you want Candy Crush the Revenge or Angry Birds 8 on your next version of Windows?

Some questions have to be asked…

If the Windows Insider programme is such a success, (1) why are the updates of such poor quality and (2) why does Windows 10 still have several long-time distasteful features.

Are the Insiders not reporting issues and dislikes? Is Microsoft ignoring the reports or just cherry-picking which ones to implement?

10 milion + how many milion home users forced to be a test program???? i doubt MS have fans

Can the 10 million figure be independently verified.

Bet, a few million registered Insiders are no longer running any Win 10 Insider Test-build.

I have just seen that the prospective “Creator’s Upgrade”, 10.0.15063.0, was built from sources on March 17. So a scant 10 days after it having been built from source code – it’s nearing customer release.

I wonder if there’s anyone at Microsoft who remembers what a “mythical man-month” is.

Even backed by 10 million pre-release testers Microsoft cannot hope to fully test an entire OS – an insanely complicated thing – and make it stable and reliable in less than a month. There are things the OS might not ever do in only one month of running!

The “Current Branch for Business” concept, where the OS gets another 4 months of testing by the world, is better, but… Maybe not good enough yet. Without a professional test organization it’s still hit or miss. A skilled SVT tester trying to break something on purpose is going to do different things.

But even with the CBB concept in place, the problem as I see it is that a culture of “we finish the code and toss the OS out there right off the engineer’s desk and see what the world thinks” can’t really work for the software that has to be the foundation for everything a person does with a computer.

How much does that culture affect patches? I think more than we or Microsoft want it to.

There’s a line from an old Air Force song that seems oddly appropriate somehow…

“It’s fast, I don’t care! It blows up in midair!”

-Noel

The concept of ‘calling all beta testers’ is not a new concept and it was not introduced by Microsoft. For an OS, it is also not new. I remember when IBM requested beta testers for OS/2 in 1991. These programs never rose to the user numbers that the W10 Insiders Program has risen to and we should acknowledge that sheer numbers are not an indication of a successful program. The quality of the end product is the best indicator.

“Windows 7 had 8 million testers ” – EMIL PROTALINSKI – OCT 22, 2009 3:00 PM UTC arstechnica

Windows 8 had a beta testing program (participation not published). On May 11, 2013, Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft corporate vice president, said that while many of the negative reviews were extreme, it was a “good thing” that Microsoft was “listening to feedback and improving a product”. Windows 8.1 was officially announced by Microsoft on May 14, 2013.

Windows 10, having 10 million beta testers (the voluntary testers, that is) is definitely impressive. ‘ Windows for Crash Test Dummies’ is a banner they do not want to wear. Firing their entire QA Team was a huge bone-headed decision. It is quality assurance that is their Achilles heel.