The awkwardly named Windows 8.1 Update 1 release earlier this year inspired speculation that Microsoft might produce a similar major group of “Update 2” enhancements for Windows 8.1 ahead of the expected Windows Threshold release . Microsoft has now made it clear that won’t happen: we’ll see small changes to Windows 8.1 as part of the monthly patching cycle, but nothing else.
Microsoft spelled out that approach in a blog post today:
Rather than waiting for months and bundling together a bunch of improvements into a larger update as we did for the Windows 8.1 Update, customers can expect that we’ll use our already existing monthly update process to deliver more frequent improvements along with the security updates normally provided as part of “Update Tuesday.” So despite rumors and speculation, we are not planning to deliver a Windows 8.1 “Update 2.”
The next scheduled Patch Tuesday update — it’s going to take some adjustment to call it Update Tuesday — is next week (and will happen Wednesday in Australia because of global time differences). The changes to Windows 8.1 Update are fairly minor in that release: enhancements to touchpad interaction, updates for Miracast, and changes to SharePoint login behaviour.
Windows 8.1 Update is now the mainstream release; as of June, Microsoft is no longer patching Windows 8.1. There’s no official date attached to Threshold; it’s rumoured for a 2015 release.
August updates for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 [Windows Experience Blog]
Comments
8 responses to “There Won’t Be A Windows 8.1 Update 2”
Can they just release another update so the “latest” version of winds has a better name? “Windows 81. Update 1” is fucking ridiculous. I know, I had god knows how many issues getting it to install (as did many others, apparently), and searching for that “product name” in Google is a major pain in the ass. (Oh, are you enquiring about the update that was to get you to 8.1, or the update after 8.1 called update 1?)
Don’t forget that the update had bugs when it was released which stopped any machine that got it from using certain WSUS servers. So no more updates!
Yeah… 8.1 Update, 8.1 update 2, etc was just being silly. Call it 8.2 or 8.3 or just plain 9 and be done with it..! 🙂
Could you imagine if Microsoft started adopting the rapid update numbering scheme that Firefox and Chrome have, for Windows? We’d be at Windows 27 before the year was out!
Even 8.1.1 and 8.1.2 would be better.
The numbers are all wrong anyway. If I’m not mistaken, XP was actually Windows 5.1, Vista was v6.0 and Windows 7 is really v6.1. So Windows 8 should really be v7, or maybe just v6.2. So Windows 8 Update 1 is really v7.0.1 or v6.2.1. But let’s not confuse the issue 🙂
But why all this fuss in a name? Doesn’t matter what you call it, it’d still be the same thing. I don’t remember people complaining as much about XP Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2 etc…. But of course there weren’t any forums like this around then for people like us to waste their time on.
Windows NT* is what you’re talking about there. Somewhat different than Windows in general – Windows 98 is MS-DOS based instead of NT based.
Though it’s all NT these days.
Yes, XP is Windows NT 5.1 and the merging of the Windows lines makes it even more confusing, because there has been a total of more than 10 Windows/NT versions…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#Client_versions