Windows issues monthly updates, but the bigger updates happen twice a year. The one that happens in the first half of the year is called the H1 release, and the one in the second half is the H2 release. The letter H refers to “half”, which is the same pattern used by finance people to refer to the first and second halves of fiscal years. (Quarters are abbreviated Q, so Q2 means “second quarter”, for example.)
You may remember that the semiannual updates used to be called the Spring and Fall releases. For example, we had the 2017 Fall Creators Update and the 2018 Spring Update. Why the name change?
It was during an all-hands meeting that a senior executive asked if the organization had any unconscious biases. One of my colleagues raised his hand. He grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite from those in the Northern Hemisphere. He pointed out that naming the updates Spring and Fall shows a Northern Hemisphere bias and is not inclusive of our customers in the Southern Hemisphere.
The names of the semiannual releases were changed the next day to be hemisphere-neutral.
In the 1990s season names were used for the periodic MSDN CD distributions until the same observation was made and the season names removed.
It’s not just “Northern Hemisphere bias”, it’s US bias. Does anyone outside the US call it “Fall”? With no context, if someone told me “we’re releasing an update in Fall” my response would be “where’s Fall, any why only there?”. Seriously.
Good to hear Microsoft can move fast when they want to.
And yet Spy++ is still broken about three years after they broke it.
I reported similar kind of bugs in UI through Feedback Hub back in the times of Technical Preview of Windows 10. The vast majority of them is still not fixed as of today.
This is a neverending complaint, you file a bug, it gets ignored, then auto-closed, you reopen it, it gets ignored again until it's auto-closed, you reopen it... there's one I've been reopening for a capability dating back to 16-bit Visual Studio for Windows 3.x which Microsoft broke around 2015 or so, which takes about ten seconds to verify, and which the VS developers have been ignoring ever since because they're too busy adding pointless bling that no-one asked for and no-one wants.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the story of Windows for the last 15 years or...
Apparently Australia’s financial year runs from July 1 to June 30. Today I learned.
And the UK’s runs from April 1 to March 31.
A lot of companies actually have fiscal years that don’t match calendar years. Fiscal year ends typically are manpower heavy, so not having it sandwiched with holidays makes life a lot easier.