Curious about how Microsoft approached Windows 8 differently than older operating systems, which might not have enjoyed such a smooth transition, we approached Chuck Walbourn, senior software development engineer for Microsoft, who reminded us that the company does perform a ton of application compatibility testing. More interesting, though, was a blog post he brought to our attention on MSDN. In short, it tells us that some of the performance, power management, compatibility, and battery efficiency improvements that would have required a service pack update in the past are now being made available through Windows Update much sooner. Thus, it's possible that, in some situations, performance and compatibility will improve on zero-day as a result of Microsoft's new delivery mechanism.
