Windows 10 App Compat Risk: Are You Behaving Commensurately?

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Windows Blog Archive articles.

The App Compat Army has had a bit of a break (well, at least I have), but there’s just no holding back the progress of technology (and the fear that this generates)! We’ve done a really terrific job of moving the world forward on the browser, and while a lot of work remains to move the CONTENT forward (and reduce dependency on tools like Enterprise Mode – which, while useful, means that in the interim you don’t have access to all of the device scenarios that might be interesting). But we’ll have to come back to that later.

Because honestly, that’s not the conversation I’ve been having lately. Rather, it’s been the unprecedented excitement I’ve been seeing around Windows 10. It’s been nearly a year since first released, and the number of enterprise customers who are getting really serious about migrating has been exploding. And with that comes the concern: will all of my stuff break?

Understandably, most people come at it with “well, let’s dust off our old Windows 7 migration plans and run through the playbook again.” But before you do that, I wanted to throw in a word of caution: make sure you are making the smartest possible risk decisions. Here’s the thing – while most people have fairly recent memory of how to do higher-risk transitions, they also have even more practice managing lower-risk transitions. You do it each and every month – probably on or around the second Tuesday of the month. You deploy changes to your operating system that have a small, but non-zero, chance of breaking apps – and you call it Patch Tuesday.

So, as you start planning out your migration, I”d start with this thought: are you behaving like you did for Windows XP retirement, or are you behaving like you do for Windows Updates? And, depending on your answer, are you sure that’s the right way to behave?