Windows 10's updates and maintenance are following a different, better path to all prior Windows releases: one with more regular updates and quicker access to new features for those who want it, while still offering enterprises a slower pace of delivery. With the first update to the Windows 10 Technical Preview a month ago, Microsoft also enabled a two-speed update track for the million or so members of the Windows Insider program.

By default, preview users are put on the slow track. However, about 10 percent of users have put themselves on the fast track. The first (contentious) fast track release was made almost two weeks ago, and fast track users have been using it since then.

Those fast track users also revealed a variety of problem scenarios. The two big ones were the screen going black (and staying black) every time a PC was unlocked, and a blue screen of death. A pair of patches have been released to fast track users to address these issues, the second coming yesterday, and both of them seem now to be fixed.

With these fixes in place, the build is ready for wider distribution, and last night rolled out to slow channel users.

This pattern is very much the kind of thing that we see with other software that uses this kind of delivery model. Chrome's dev and beta channels, for example, receive new builds more often than the stable channel, enabling problems to be sorted before they can affect most users.

Our expectation is that the Windows Insider program will continue to run even after Windows 10 is launched. With the three announced stable release cadences (a fast consumer-oriented one, a medium business-oriented one, and a slow critical system-oriented one), and two-speed insider program, this will leave Windows users on up to five different versions of Windows 10.

This sounds daunting, but is not too different from what browser developers are doing. Firefox, for example, has its infrequently updated Extended Support Release (analogous to the business track for Windows 10), its regular stable release (equivalent to the consumer track), a beta release, and a developer release, approximately equivalent to the slow and fast insider tracks, respectively.

The biggest difference comes at the extremes. Firefox and Chrome both have nightly builds that update once or more a day. Microsoft isn't planning anything like this for Windows. But Windows has something at the opposite end, with its critical system track.

The browser developers have shown that this tiered model, with multiple versions extant in the wild, can be very effective and is a good fit for consumer software.

We were, however, a little surprised at the percentage of fast channel users. Windows 10 Technical Preview is not really suitable for day-to-day usage; it's a test operating system for early adopters, and if you're going to be an early adopter, one might expect that you'd be an early early adopter and ride in the fast lane. Microsoft says 10 percent is about what it "hoped to see."