Howard Oakley
Software vendors should make a New Year’s resolution to ensure that upgrades and updates to their products are more user-friendly.
How did your wall calendar update go, then? Have you found any incompatibilities between Calendar 2010 and 2009? Or worse, did Calendar 2010 crash repeatedly until you applied patches to February and September? Assuming that you weren’t so penniless that you had to recycle an old calendar from 1999 (the last year starting on a Friday), you shouldn’t have had any such problems, unlike most computer users last year.
Anyone brave enough to use Windows Vista, then to wait from 86 minutes to more than 20 hours for the Windows 7 upgrade to be performed ‘in place’, deserves an award for patience. Although Snow Leopard may have resulted in fewer upgrade upsets, even Apple has lost some friends. A lot of perfectly good scanners became oversized paperweights due to changes to their support. A few early adopters saw their Time Machine backups blown away, as Snow Leopard’s new version fired up and replaced them with its own initial full backup.
To be fair, these issues were relatively infrequent and most reasonably preventable, making Mac OS X 10.6 one of the better initial releases. This gave Apple no grounds for complacency, and the size of the 10.6.1 update was indicative that there was still lots to be fixed. For sheer magnitude though, Roxio’s Toast 10 Titanium update to 10.0.3 must hold the record, at nearly 860MB and replacing every component.
If software vendors make a New Year’s resolution, may it be for upgrades and updates to be more friendly. When they know that certain areas are likely to cause problems with existing software and hardware, they should tell us honestly and openly, so that we can prepare and make timely decisions. If I have to buy a new scanner or printer, then I would much sooner discover that before my Mac has restarted, and my existing peripheral is now unrecognised and unsupported. If I need to take special precautions to preserve old backups, explain what I need to do.
Such information need not detract from the marketing hype that vendors feel obliged to pour forth in order to coax us into upgrading. There will never be any shortage of early adopters, eager to rush headlong into installation on the day of release. In the following weeks, there will be far fewer nasty shocks among those who take their technology at a more considered pace – and they’re the customers whose loyalty the vendor needs most.
The size of on-the-fly updates must be kept to a minimum, and there must be greater coherence in the way we spot and apply them. Not all of us sit at the end of 1Gbit/sec pipes or use only Apple’s software products. With a spread portfolio, it becomes easy to waste hours tracking, downloading and installing updates and security patches. Most applications now consist of scores or even thousands of files, collated into a .app application bundle. When a few of those files need to be patched, there’s no need to replace the entire 250MB application and abundant support files.
Wouldn’t it be great if this year, upgrading software was as easy as your wall calendar – rather than having to replace the neighbouring door or find a bigger wall to pin it on?
