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The Trouble With Software Upgrades
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "When software makers urge upgrades, it isn't always in users' best interest, the Wall Street Journal reports. Many upgrades bring advertising or other unwanted features; some iTunes users felt this way about a recent upgrade. But for many programs, downgrading can be a headache--Yahoo generally doesn't link to old versions of software, and Apple says iTunes can't be downgraded. Some websites can help with the problem. OldVersion.com, for instance, offers more than 600 versions of about 65 different programs. The site's 16-year-old administrator says, 'Companies make a lot of new versions. They're not always better for the consumer.'"
Here is a problem for most software companies, and one reason I would never invest in a publicly traded software company. It is also the prime reason that I sold off my portion of a private software company I had owned.
The problem? Obsolescence.
Software seems to be obsolete almost immediately after it is released. If a better product doesn't replace it, the product itself contains bugs that require a new release or at least a patch. The difficulty in pricing software is figuring out what percentage of the sale profit needs to be held back to cover long term support (updates and customer service).
One way developers are recouping the expense of upgrades is by offering yearly support subscriptions, but these are better suited for corporations who desire a fixed budget. For the home user, I'm betting most prefer to buy a program once and desire a lifetime of upgrades. Recently I complained (to myself) about needing to rebuy a program that had been updated -- until I realized I hadn't bought a version from the company for 4 years!
The end result is for the company to find others willing to pay for the upgrades. Users who desire something at a discount should be willing to at least admit that they're also part of the problem -- they tell the developers that they'll buy a product at a certain price, and they give the developers reason for finding ways to pay for that product in the long haul.
In all the software I use (a ton of it between my businesses, my home, my side projects, my church congregation tech junk, and my family needs), very rarely does an upgrade work against me. In fact, I'd say 95% of upgrades I've performed in the past 10 years made me more efficient, even if they incorporated certain things I didn't like.
If software wants to do something you don't want it to do, block it with your firewall. For me, that's the only necessary step.
The final part of the quote: "They're not always better for the consumer" needs to be looked at differently. Updates that allow the developer to continue updating and supporting the software ARE good for the consumer, just maybe not in the "now" but in the long run. The time preference of the developer might be different than the consumer, but they have to be similar or the developer won't last.
I seriously hate it when someone says, "Here's the new release, it's going in right away!" That's where the term "Bleeding Edge" comes in.
I typically upgrade when I feel I need to, i.e. there's some new feature which really is great or required for the work you do.
Lastly, this guy is 16? Props!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
First, the article is pointless. So yeah, so updates suck. Sometimes they remove features you liked/needed, sometimes the update is buggier than the older version. Welcome to computer software, this hasen't changed since the begining of time (relative to software that is). So what new insights did this have to offer, er, none.
Now, one to the more "interesting" aspect of this posting. I took a quick gander over at oldversion.com, I assume they have checked into the legality of carrying and distributing the commercial software that appears there?
Upgragde does not mean better. WindowsME was supposed to be an upgrade to 98SE. Trust me, it wasn't.
The company I work for writes software. Trust me, I would not recommend anyone to buy the first release of any upgrade we offer. Wait until it gets about 30 or 40 builds and becomes stable.
I guess you could say that the reliability of software is like a wave: It goes up until a major release, then it drops down to the bottom and starts working it's way back up again. When the software becomes perfectly reliable and feature complete, it's time to release a new version, and down we go again.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
> When software makers urge upgrades, it isn't always in users' best interest, the Wall Street Journal reports.
They've got a bunch of geniuses over at the WSJ, haven't they.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Try the new version, its ads are bigger and the privacy intrusions are twice as invasive!
Just don't try to go retro, or we will disable your account and report you to the internet police.
(sarcasm off)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Unfortunately most non-technical users have "Upgradeitis", which means that all it takes to get them to upgrade a piece of software is to tell them in straight forward language "An upgrade to XYZ software is available" and make the upgrade process painless. The average user (in most cases I think) doesn't stop and ask themselves, do I really need this? Is the software I have now doing what I want it to do? What's in this upgrade that I really want/need? How will this upgrade affect my data and/or other applications?
Seems to me that they've become almost programmed to think of anything new as necessarily "better" and thus desirable without ever thinking of the old addage "If it ain't broke don't fix it", couple this with the propensity of many users to load up on drive by download software that they'll probably only ever use once and you end up with a pay per incident support providers wet dream.
There's a part of the movie when Elliot Carver is having a teleconference with his underlings, and one of the questions he asks is:
Elliot Carver: "How about our new software?"
Underling: "We are releasing on schedule. As requested, it is full of bugs, and users will be forced to keep upgrading for years."
I wonder how valid that statement actually is.
Perfect case in point: I have a 4 year old laptop that I keep in my kitchen. It's running Windows XP (barely) but it's really low on memory. (192MB minus video memory) I like to listen to music on it, since it's in my kitchen and readily accessible. I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it, and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running. Now, when I used to run WinAMP on my old 233MHz Pentium with 32MB of memory, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't using 80MB of RAM while running. I don't need visual effects. I don't need an integrated web browser. I don't need a catalog of my 200GB music collection. I just want to listen to music... And it's not like iTunes or Windows Media Player are any better. They're hogs, too. I tried Foobar2000, but it hates my sound card and uses a lot of CPU. So I'm stuck. Whenever I start WinAMP, it takes 5 minutes to load, and when I quit, it takes 5 minutes to unload from memory.
I can't wait to get home and install WinAMP 2.0!
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
...when you call the outsourced, scripted tech-cupport center.
"Are you running the latest version?"
"No."
"Well, we need you to install it so we can diagnose your problem."
---
More often than not the upgrade is better, it's the 5% of times when it's a pain. Due to software development and support being a resource hog, vendors are quick to abandon older versions instead of developting patch trains for multiple releases.
Considering how long I feel like I've been using Oldversions to stay with my favorite/most stable builds of programs... was this kid a fetus when he started it?
In all seriousness, that place saved my life when I was stuck with WinME for a year in college and the school mail program conflicted with everything. The no ad and non-resource hog (I'm looking at you, Winamp and iTunes) versions of programs are the way to go.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
not necessarily good for the customer.
Why do companies make new version?
1. To fix bugs
2. To introduce new features
3. To fix hacks.
Now, a bugfix is usually a good thing. If the bug applies to you (like, when your certain combination of graphics card, CPU and mainboard doesn't enjoy having unmutex'ed multithreading that works allright on the test setup... don't laugh). If not, the bugfix is nice but unnecessary.
A feature add on is usually pointless. If you buy some software, you buy it for the features it has, not for the features it might have somewhere in the future. I stopped buying software on promises, I buy it on tests and reviews. If it has what I want, I buy. If it does not, I don't. Simple binary logic. So when a new version has a new feature, most of the time I don't need it.
So what remains is the big reason that has NO benefit for the customer and ONLY benefits for the seller. To close holes that allowed you to do with the thing what its manufacturer didn't want you to do. This can be anything from a "crack" (yeah, like the new version can't be cracked... but that's not the point) to actual firmware upgrades of certain well known companies that also distribute rootkits that should make sure that you use ONLY games that they deem appropriate for the area you're in. We're not even talking illegal copies here, we're talking region protection.
So much for the global market.
So who benefits from version updates? You? Or the manufacturer?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's that? You say that they're talking about Windows? Pfff. Who uses Windows? I mean, do users have any clue how hard it is to uninstall... Oh.
:-P
(Yes, my tongue is again located in the cheek area.)
Yes, between Steve Jobs' cheeks it would seem...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Winamp version 5.old users, unite!
I vowed never to upgrade after I found out that they took measures to discourage ripping of broadcasted mp3s.. ala streamripper. Nevermind I don't need ads, and the existing version works just great for my purposes. That was what, in 2000 or something.. I forget the exact details now.
Computers are about performing tasks, not running software. If it doesn't do new tasks, or old tasks (much better), why upgrade?
..don't panic
Of course, 3rd party stuff that replaced the functionality quickly surfaced, but it all feels very hacky.
On the other side of the coin, there's the dreaded feature bloat. Take Adobe's Acrobat for instance - every new version has come with extra features, and exponentially longer start times. Ugh.
So many reasons not to upgrade. If you have a computer used for recording, you quickly learn to never fix what ain't broke. I am one of the few using SP2 successfully with my audio hardware, which is no longer being made. Of course, Windows doesn't make things any easier to back out of an upgrade.
Mac = rename old version, test new, toss new. Windows = huh? Some files could not be removed? Why doesn't this work anymore? I uninstalled it. Aw, hell. System restore...damnit! Time to nuke, and reinstall. Repeat. Oh, no...
Will agree with you wholeheartedly.
The company I work for uses QuickBooks Enterprise. We started on Version 5 (Quickbooks 2005). It worked pretty well. There were a few very small hiccups, but mostly it did what we needed it to do. We had purchased upgrade protection because we knew a new version would be coming out shortly. About the 5th of December or so we received the 2006 Update.
Now, being skeptical to begin with, I was NOT going to install this right out of the box. It's one thing to upgrade WinZip or WinAmp to the next version, another thing entirely to take the company's accounting server down for an upgrade that hasn't been proven in the wild for more than 5 days.
Skip forward to the beginning of February. Two months have passed and the support forums on the QB2006 site are relatively quiet. There is no patch released yet, and no notification that they are working on a patch.
We decide to do the install.
WORST DECISION EVER
The system is completely unstable. It crashes repeatedly. We lose transaction data. It's not possible to 'downgrade' without completely knocking the server offline for baseline rebuild from ghost. The amount of data on the server would take about 8 hours to rebuild, and the server is being accessed about 18-20 hours a day by different shifts. We finally orchestrate a weekend rebuild about 7 days later, and then spend about 30 hours taking the data out of the new version and putting it into the old version.
I might add, when we called Intuit to tell them about our issues, here was their response: "Well, there's nothing we can tell you. It's a known issue. You'll have to downgrade to v5. We know the uninstall funcationality is broken, you'll need to restore from a previous backup. No, there's no ETA for when the patch is coming out."
To make matters worse, the version 6 update was a crock anyways. We've since installed it with the latest patch and it 'works', but it's slow as molasses, buggy as hell, and still notoriously unstable. If the Accounting department didn't habitually use two of its new features, I'd push us back to QB2005 just to stop having the issues.
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
If software wants to do something you don't want it to do, block it with your firewall. For me, that's the only necessary step.
What about when it does LESS than the previous version?
My box got infested with the Sony malware, thanks to my daughter. I'd stupidly lost the driver disks for my video card and audio chip, and there were no versions on the internet I could find that worked with 98; all were for XP.
I've found absolutely zero increased functionality with XP over 98. None whatever. (If one of you kind souls would point something out that XP will do that 98 wouldn't, please point it out... and not Microsoft's laughable firewall, I use Zone Alarm).
There are programs that ran just fine in 98 that XP won't run. And what's an OS for? Running your software.
However, I can no longer burn multisession CDs, which really pisses me off. I record friends' music, then put it on CD with MP3s in the extended portion.
Not any more. Thanks, Microsoft, for taking my hundred dollars and leaving me with LESS functionality!
Ask and ye shall recieve, go here. Cheers!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I have never updated Swat4 to 1.1 due to their patch adding in game advertising.
http://www.massiveincorporated.com/
"SWAT4 fans have been on the offensive, following news that the new 1.1 patch contains a feature adding advertising to the game and collecting players' data, including IP address and how long they play for. The new patch implements Massive streaming ad support, which changes some of the in-game textures to adverts for real products. It also gathers information about players, detailed in their privacy policy."
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
And I'll say this:
Piracy is not always a bad thing. I used to pirate 3d software back in high school before I could afford it (or justify to my parents that I needed it) Now, some years later, I happily own Maya and Modo. If I had never pirated other 3d apps in the past, I probably never would have gotten into 3d and eventually shelled out the money to Alias and Luxology (and various book publishers, training DVD resources, texture collection CDs, etc) Does it make the fact that I originally did pirate software? No, but like I said, it worked out in the long run. (Keep in mind, this was before there were readily available personal learning editions, and when 3D was even more expensive than it is now)
Ouch, that sux... BTW now might be a good time to hit management up for a testing environment. :)
OMG, the internets are a great resource for bomb-making, and finding whores, and pirating software and music and movies.
Whats your point? Oldversion.com is a tool with a very legitimate use. Just like anything else, it has the potential to be used in nefarious ways.
BTW, Congratulations on no longer being a criminal.
Overall, I don't upgrade software, just because there happens to be a new version out. Unless there's a feature we need, we usually leave it alone if it isn't broke.
But I almost always install Windows OS upgrades. The critical one, anyway. I don't have the time to check to make sure our particular company falls under a certain OS vulnerability. Trusting Microsoft makes me nervous. But the prospect of getting a call in the middle of the afternoon because some building's PCs are ate up with something, and having some smartass co-worker point out to a boss that "there was a fix out for this, I saw it on Slashdot" scares me even more.
VOTE!
I find it interesting that even Microsoft doesn't have faith in their own "next version" (Windows ME). Ouch.
I'm sure most companies don't care that he's providing old versions on his website. After all, those versions (in the mind of the companies) are all outdated and obfuscated, and if a user really wants to subject themselves to using such a "crappy" version, then they should feel free. Besides, TFA even says that he's only been asked to remove 2 programs from the site, and he complied both times.
We are having the same issues here with Quickbooks 2006 Standard and Accountants Edition. THis past weekend Intuit released a patch for the "File must be opened on the server feature" and other "features" which have given us a headache. We just updated our test "Quickbooks server" this morning and are working on getting the testing done. For those of you unaware, any flavor of Quickbooks 2006 is ectremely problamitic becuase they have made major changes to the database. One of them being (I beleive) is that they use Sybase now instead of a proprietary database. Anyways we are urging our clients to hold off on upgrading to Quickbooks 2006 until Intuit cleans up 2006.
Edonkey has actually saved my butt a few times when new software versions fuddled or broke a service. There's a great catalogue of retired legacy versions of popular (and unpopular) apps on the ED2k networks. It ain't stealing if you bought it, right?
On the other hand, how long should a vendor have to provide support for a piece of software? Should Broderbund still have to provide phone support for The Print Shop v2.0 (1994)?
If software companies can't end-of-life products, and have to support them indefinitely, the cost of vendor support becomes insanely high.
In the US auto industry, car manufacturers are required to produce replacement parts for a model for seven years.* Perhaps a regulation of that kind would be good for software/hardware vendors, too.
*Except Yugo, what with the giant war and everything.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
Features and bugs = carrot and stick. Every version is to give you enough new buggy features to make you want to upgrade to the next version after that. If you haven't figured that out by now, you really shouldn't be in IT or sales in general.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why do you accept that? That'd be my question!
If I got a car that failed to start 5 mornings of the year, I'd be pretty pissed off. If I got a TV that wasn't compatible with channel three or seven, I'd be rather annoyed. If my car's doors unlocked randomly on the third Tuesday of the month, I'd be frustrated. If I got a VCR that couldn't timer record at 58 minutes after the hour, I'd be pretty pissed off too!
So why do we let our computer programs have these problems? Why do programs need to be killed or the computer restarted at random (freezing during startup isn't as common since win2k). Why do we accept a computer program that doesn't seem to handle the formats established at the time with ease (think Windows XP destroying exif information on jpgs)? Why do we accept holes in our software that lets crooks in along with their bots, spyware, and adware? Why Why why?!?
I've always been a fan of a certain car maker (and still am), but when I got a 2004 sport sedan and a few weeks later had my dash light up brighter than a christmas tree, the dealer tells me that their software/flash upgrade to the car should fix the issue. Sure enough, it did, and by the forums, it wasn't an uncommon problem with early production of the model. But this is stemming into other areas. An audio system I got in 2000 couldn't read any CD-Rs- obviously it didn't spend enough time in testing, as this should have come up. My car had bugs! The EPROM on my new furnace needed to be replaced. This is getting silly!
Sure bugs are bound to get through, but it is the programmer's responsibility to properly test their program. I'd rather Windows 2000 be released today and have it stable as anything and a solid performer. This isn't how things work. Microsoft spends more time making Spider Solitaire for Vista then they do testing the OS itself.
Updates aren't always better. Sometimes they add functionality, like additional CD Recorder capability, updated roster information for a sports game, security fixes, etc. Other times they add bloat and problems.
Anyone remember ICQ 99b and the 98's? Memory footprint of about 1MB, fast as anything, fixed the data corruption issues of previous versions. Good upgrade. Then recall late 99 versions and 2000+, where the memory footprint was about 80MB, the thing took a good minute to start up. It was buggy, and an ad-city. Then they wonder why it died a horrible death to the favour of MSN? Pack hundreds of features in there and make it slow as anything and nobody will go back. Wait... That's a good description of Windows.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
I used to love my Quickbooks. That was 10 years ago. Now, every new version adds more advertising built in then the last, puts more stuff in web browser style (or actual in some cases) interfaces, and starts costing more money.
Worse, they don't support common file interchanges and actually make it as hard as possible to use them, instead forcing me to pay THEM for the privilidge of connecting to my back. They also charge my bank, or charges me too! All this, for what should be free.
What stinks, is that MS Money small business is unusable (and talks to me -- which is even worse) and the other products out there are insanely expensive.
I've looked for one that runs in linux natively, but not found anything workable yet (I'd still love one that did).
Grrrrr. I've gone form loving to hating Intuit in just 3 years. What a shame.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Still using QB v5.0 purchased in 1996. Upon installation it asks if you want to install Netscape 2.0 to access its online services.
I'm totally blind to the three dialogs asking if I want to update the tax tables by calling an 800 number. Just reflexively click ok-ok-ok.
One of these days I'm going to call the phone number to see if it's still connected. At this point I'll probably get around to it in 2010 or so.
Great piece of software.
One major software title I used to use a lot had this problem. I hopped on board at about version 2. This company had a very active beta program, and it was not uncommon to see a new version once a week. Unfortunately, they spent such an unbalanced amount of time on new development as opposed to bug fixing, that the new builds were very often worse than the old ones. You might argue that this was beta and so I cannot expect a polished product, and I agree. However, there was essentially no difference between the betas and the releases. It was widely believed that the week of the next planned release or paid upgrade, they'd take the best beta of the last few weeks and call it a release. (I don't think they ever did a "feature freeze")
It was very common among the developers that used the betas, to keep ALL previous betas. Many users were stuck several versions back because a critical feature they required had been broken several builds ago and had not been fixed yet. It was a very aggrivating tradeoff, to be dealing with a month-old build because you needed feature ABC to work, but then to see them fix (or add) three other things you really had been waiting for but that you can only drool at because you simply cannot upgrade until they fix your issue.
Sometimes you'd upgrade and then a week later get flooded with bug reports. Track down the problem and find it's the compiler itself that is causing the problem, and back you go, to last month's build. I was running several months behind on several occasions, using versions that were betas published prior to the most current release, which was already in a new beta cycle. In that case there simply was no release that ran acceptably.
All in all a very frustrating experience. I made my last paid upgrade at v4.5, it's now around version 7 I think, I've stopped keeping track of it since about 5.5. There are a lot of others in my same situation, agreeing that 4.52 is the best version that was ever released, from a stability standpoint.
What's really going to bite is when more companies go to a subscription model, and require a periodic payment to keep the program you already have running. When those companies go out of business or stop supporting an older version, you're just plain screwed. You'l be foreced to upgrade and suffer the consequences, or go through the torture that is changing products after you're already established with one.
Somewhat on topic... what's the current legal interpretation of software made by a company that is out of business? Is it considered public domain at that point? Or does the (defunct) author have to release it into the public domain? Or does it expire after a certain timespan or after termination of support?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.