Their tens of millions of customers who plan internal deployment, overtime, and other things around those specific dates?
> it's Microsoft internal schedule
It's their external schedule actually.
If some companies want to wait 2 days then let them make their own choice. It seems like a pretty stupid policy that nothing (except extreme cases) should get patched except when it's convenient.
They already do via WSUS. Companies get to plan this work to start on the second Tuesday of every month because that's the day Microsoft publishes them. Nobody puts a gun to company's heads and forces them to deploy internally.
> If some companies want to wait 2 days then let them make their own choice. It seems like a pretty stupid policy that nothing (except extreme cases) should get patched except when it's convenient.
This seems to be a complaint about a "policy" which doesn't exist and has no relationship to the topic at hand. I don't even really entirely understand the above.
If you plan your internal deployment updates based on the belief that the schedule will never change, then I'm really sorry for you and your users. In real world, not all issues are reported in advance - some are observed in the wild, and in that case you have to fast-track the fix. If you have no way to do that (e.g. because the vendor only releases fixes on Tuesdays once per month, or because you decided to choose such schedule on your own), then good luck. That might have been appropriate in 1995, not in 2015.
There are many projects and/or companies publishing fixes continuously, and leaving it up to the users when/how to apply them in production. That's essentially what all the linux distributions (RH, Suse, ...) and smaller projects do.
Not entirely true now. Users of MS software have built up their own testing processes around patch Tuesday.
Patch Tuesday was one of the best things MS did when they decided to take security seriously. They realized that testing patches downstream takes time and giving their customers a consistent patch day let them also plan ahead.