Automatic Updates: Balancing Control And Convenience In Software

Driven by Google and like-minded software makers, a new era is dawning in which your software is constantly refreshed--often without any intervention on your part at all. Depending on how you see things, that could be either a scary loss of control over your own computer or a boon to convenience and security. Either way, the practice is increasingly common. I, for one, welcome it.

In the last week or so, I've manually updated Google's Chrome, Chrome Canary, and Picasa; Adobe Systems' Flash Player, Photoshop, Premiere, and AIR; Microsoft Windows 7 and Office 2008 for the Mac; Apple Aperture; Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird; Opera; and Evernote. Should this really be my job? Automatic updates can cause compatibility problems and yield control to corporations whose agendas may differ from your own, but used judiciously, I think it's an improvement.

In days of yore, software came on disks manufactured and shipped at some expense to customers. But the Internet Age has enabled not just digital distribution, but frequent distribution, and programmers are following suit with a more continual stream of smaller updates.

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