This also greatly cut down the number of leaks from within the company, which in the past bothered the company due to legal complications of contracted features becoming available earlier than anticipated.
The Windows Insider Program was also introduced with Windows 10, which boosted the company's engagement with beta testers as well as distributed new pre-release builds more frequently than the prior beta testing initiatives. The schedule was realigned in 2021 in that feature updates for Windows 10 would be released annually in order to be consistent with Windows 11's new release cadence. Originally, feature updates were released twice in a year, with the first feature update being released in spring and the other in autumn. Usually, these updates are a new build of the operating system, although in a few cases Microsoft released feature updates consisting of a limited set of new functionality using the regular cumulative update infrastructure.
Windows 10 is the last version to support upgrade paths from Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and the only version to upgrade to Windows 11.Ī new release model called Windows as a service was introduced with smaller and regular feature updates, as opposed to releasing a major version of Windows every few years. As of October 2022, operating systems from the series run on 71.29% of Windows devices. It succeeded Windows 8.1 and was ultimately superseded by Windows 11 in October 2021. Windows 10 is a series of Microsoft Windows operating systems, first introduced in July 2015 after being announced in September 2014. For the original operating system release called "Windows 10", see Windows 10 (original release). This article is about the operating system series developed since 2014.