Jul 09
No Updates, Thank You
Updates are an important part of the software industry, but for some reason, they are extremely feared. This guy who is switching away from Lotus Notes lists his reasons for leaving:
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3. No more waiting for the AdminP guy/gal to do his/her work.
4. Way too many fixes on Lotus Fix List databases.
5. Killnotes.exe should be more of an attitude than a program.
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I can’t understand why “way too many fixes” would be a problem. Certainly, way too many bugs, or way too much time to install fixes could be an issue, but those likely aren’t the problem because they weren’t mentioned. Far too many people have an irrational fear of software updates. When it comes to operating systems, updates mean the vendor did a poor job writing the software and is now finally getting around to fixing bugs that you never experienced anyway. In the web world, updates are agile and mean new features are being released. Why does such a dichotomy exist? Perhaps it stems from the interaction with the actual update process. If something is obtrusive and sucks, people hate it (and they should), but if something is so seamless and transparent that you might not even realize it’s happening, then what is there to hate?
Joel and Jeff discussed updates in their latest podcast and Jeff recommends the Firefox model where updates are as close to transparent as possible (for a desktop application). This is a great strategy and makes a lot of users happy, but unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for all companies, especially when they are trying to update someone else’s software. Read the first page of search of “microsoft firefox silent update” and you’ll be blasted with words like “sneak, sabotage, infiltrate, and invade” because a plugin was installed silently.
The best update model is the no-control model. Don’t give users the ability to see that an update is happening, let alone stop it from happening. This is basically the model of the web. When website owners decide it’s time for you to upgrade, you are getting that upgrade. But if you are using this model, you must be very confident that an update is going to work every where it is used. Having never written a piece of software that is used by millions of people, I can only assume this is a monumental task, but with some practice, it is no doubt achievable.
You don’t necessarily have to have a web application to get this model either, although it certainly helps. When every user is always running the latest version and doesn’t have the option to go back to previous versions, you save so much effort on support and maintenance. The benefits of supporting only one version of software far outweigh the risks taken to do so.
Maybe hating software updates isn’t such a bad thing after all. You have to know an update is happening to hate it.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Interesting topic! I would typically describe myself as somebody who is ready and willing to accept all updates as soon as they are available. However, there is definitely a big crowd of people who follow the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mentality. They have some very valid points, too. In fact, I’m currently using this mentality with my Ubuntu 8.10 install. I was so excited to get 9.04 installed but then I heard about the problems with the ATI drivers. I freaked out and decided that I couldn’t afford to have any more problems with my environment. For me, the benefits of 9.04 have yet to outweigh the possibility of big upgrade problems. I can’t afford to spend hours trying to fix issues. So, I think people definitely have their reasons… and some of them (probably a lot of them) stem from bad experiences in the past.
July 28th, 2009 at 10:31 am
I agree with most of your points, but I think a decent number of users do want to know if they are being upgraded. They’d rather see an upgrade notice than wake up the next morning to a different layout or new/obsolete feature. Also back in the day a lot of people still used and swore by Winamp 2.x even though versions 3 and 4 had come out.
Seamless upgrading is awesome, but you shouldn’t take away the ability of the users to deny it and/or roll back to a different version (in a desktop environment at least). WordPress, actually, does a decent job of handling both concerns I think.
Your contrast/compare of the web vs desktop is interesting though. Remember when people were “allowed” for a while to use the old Facebook layout after they rolled out the new one? A rare occurrence of upgrade choice being allowed on the web.
July 29th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
@jason, that really shows how Ubuntu has failed in its release. Producing an operating system is no doubt one of the most difficult software projects, but releasing an update that people don’t want to use makes all of their work pointless.
@kevin, it doesn’t make a difference if users get an upgrade notice or not. The upgrade still went through and now they are going to live with it. If the Facebook changes tell us anything, it’s that people hate change for the first week, then after that, they will forget there was ever an old interface.