Windows 10 Documentation Is a Mess

When Microsoft updates Windows 10, as it has recently, there's a lot of coverage in the tech press about new features. Documentation is rarely discussed. However, Ed Bott, who has been covering Microsoft for a long time, rips into them for the "unholy mess" that is the documentation for the latest Windows 10 release. 

One of the unexpected and unwelcome side effects of Microsoft's push to Windows as a Service is that its documentation has become an unruly mess.

The problem isn't a lack of information. Microsoft's generally been doing a good job of describing high-level changes in Windows and then supplying lots of technical detail about those changes in relatively short order. That's especially true for topics that matter to developers and to people deploying Windows at scale in enterprise shops.

The trouble is finding those details when you need them. Important information is scattered about Microsoft.com like so many puzzle pieces, and it can be a challenge to try to fit those pieces together. For technicians, support specialists, and power users, the move to semi-annual updates is a special challenge. It's practically a full-time job to keep up with the hundreds of changes that arrive with each new version, then do it again six months later for the next feature update.

I have to agree with him. Recently, I had problems getting the 1909 update to install and trying to find information about how to resolve the problem was almost impossible on the Microsoft site. The best information came from third-party tech sites and forums. (Uninstalling Malware Bytes allowed the update to proceed.)

This isn't anything new. The quality of Microsoft's online documentation has been a running joke among technical writers since I started working in the field in the 1990s.

Until they get their act together, I strongly recommned bookmarking the Windows 10 Information Hub site, created by Ed Bott for ZDnet.