The State Of Updates

Right now almost every program on my computer has its own update mechanism of some sort. They primarily fall into three categories.

• Notify me of an available update
  • Pidgin
  • WinSCP
  • VMware Server
• Udate themselves from within the program
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • Quicken
  • Opera
  • Photoshop
• Special updating program that runs at startup and constantly uses memory
  • Java
  • Quicktime/iTunes
  • Google Pack (Picasa, Desktop Search, etc)
  • Thinkpad utilities

With every program doing its own thing, keeping your software up-to-date is a bit of a hassle and certainly not something the “average” user does.

Windows/Microsoft Update

Microsoft has their own updating software of course: Windows Update. It can already be extended to update other Microsoft products through Microsoft Update. They also serve up drivers for various WHQL’d hardware through it.

Why not open this up for any program on your system? This could be another feature to help differentiate Windows Vista or Windows 7 from the competition (OS X or Windows XP). This would also address one of the pain-points to “boxed” software that web applications don’t have.

Updates ala YUM, APT, or Xbox Live

I’m not saying that Microsoft should host files and provide bandwidth for every Windows application on the planet. They could create a secure way for third-party applications to be updated from the developer’s site through Windows Update.

YUM or APT on Linux is similar to this concept but it only works reliably if you only install software from repositories. Xbox Live also manages updates for every piece of software that runs on an Xbox 360 and it rectifies one of the main reasons for why I don’t PC game: it is such a pain to keep games up-to-date.

Ultimately Microsoft is a platform company, and this would make the Windows platform more attractive to users and developers. Having a unified method and interface would greatly simplify keeping software up-to-date, particularly for less savvy users. It could also have the effect of improving system security by making it easier for people to have the latest version of programs (Quicktime, Reader, Flash) that have been recently targeted through web browsers by hackers as well.

I would think that developers would appreciate not having to maintain software just to help…maintain software too. It really is kind of silly that everyone has to reinvent-the-wheel each time for updating their applications. Certainly there are some details for Microsoft to work out on how to implement this, but that is their problem. I’m just the idea man. :)

*Before anyone sends me an e-mail about this, yes I do know that there are programs such as RadarSync that claim to keep all of your applications up-to-date. I have yet to try one that is easy to use and actually works however.