Introducing Unified Update Platform
From the perspective of a long-time Windows user who at one point managed the services my former employer used to keep hosts up to date, this is an excellent development.<p>Execution will be important here and IMHO, and it has been done pretty poorly with the past versions of Windows Update&#x2F;WSUS -- there&#x27;s a lot of room for improvement.  A lot of the benefit will center around how Differential Update is performed.  Is this purely at the file level or are they actually delivering the differences in the files (similar to how I read Chrome updates were delivered).  The latter would likely involve a lot more processing on the MS&#x2F;WSUS side, but could dramatically lower bandwidth requirements.<p>The next piece centers around the WSUS component itself.  I found it interesting that they&#x27;ve specifically used the word &quot;Unified&quot;.  Could there be a future where I, as an ISV, can publish an update&#x2F;update repository for my application and have patches to my software delivered via update services?  It always puzzled me that while I can create an MSI&#x2F;MSP file for deployment, I could not similarly produce an MSU file for updating.  Third-party software has eclipsed the core OS software as far as vulnerability threats and patching it in an enterprise is a <i>nightmare</i>.  Most large Windows enterprises use System Center Configuration Manager which is best described as a swiss-army knife for software delivery and at its worst, described as a bunch of unrelated tools that are used to deploy software with different rules depending on what the software is.  Standardizing patch delivery, or even simply <i>allowing</i> a third-party to install a patch via WSUS would have made patching browser plug-ins, Adobe Reader and other common software (some of which provide more attack vectors than features) a lot less painful.  We maintained a 99.5% patch target with varying range requirements and while we nearly always hit those targets with OS patches, we almost never hit them with these third-party applications.  They didn&#x27;t mention this as a specific feature, and the naming could simply be the marketing department picking a new buzz-word, but I&#x27;m hoping this is a future path they&#x27;re planning on taking.<p>Personally, I&#x27;d like to see updating that&#x27;s as easy on Windows as it is on my openSuse or Ubunto hosts.  Repositories are used to manage the various vendors, updates are packaged the same, standardized and &quot;It Just Works&quot; for the most part.