More Than Half of PC Applications Installed Worldwide Are Out-of-Date (helpnetsecurity.com)

Avast's PC Trends Report 2019 found [PDF] that users are making themselves vulnerable by not implementing security patches and keeping outdated versions of popular applications on their PCs. From a news report: The applications where updates are most frequently neglected include Adobe Shockwave (96%), VLC Media Player (94%) and Skype (94%). The report, which uses anonymized and aggregated data from 163 million devices across the globe, also found that Windows 10 is now installed on 40% of all PCs globally, which is fast approaching the 43% share held by Windows 7. However, 15% of all Windows 7 users and 9% of all Windows 10 users worldwide are running older and no longer supported versions of their product, for example, the Windows 7 Release to Manufacturing version from 2009 or the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update from early 2017.

Comments

Because upgrades are often crap

[AmiMoJo]

Half the time the upgrade doesn't add any value for the user, so why upgrade? VLC is a great example, it pretty much just works and the updates only add support for very obscure stuff that most users don't care about.

The real problem is that security fixes are not well communicated, and that sometimes abused as a way to get users to take user-hostile changes.