I love this article. Thanks for posting it wyday.
wyday
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cached 4 months ago
I wonder if someday, someone will ask why Inc failed, and the answer will be that they put big splash screen ads in front of articles. |
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cached 3 months ago
Right, because nothing inspires risk taking in a corporation like a good old fashioned witch hunt. I agree with you in that this is a shitty thing for MS to do (hell, I was one of the first ones to write a blog post explaining how to undo it - http://wyday.com/blog/2008/how-to-uninstall-microsoft-net-fr... ). But, a witch hunt is idiotic. |
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cached about 1 month ago
Ideally, yes. And that's certainly how companies are marketing their free AVs. The reality is that before we started signing all of our software, the free AVs detected it as a virus. It's bad for business when you have to defend your product as not a virus (on top of trying to sell it!) I wrote about it 2 years ago: http://wyday.com/blog/2007/useful-instantupdate-feedback/ |
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cached 26 days ago
My company develops an updater/patcher. The updater is open source (wyUpdate) and the update creator is commercial (wyBuild). You make a few good points in your post. We get a lot of customers trying to solve the very problems you describe. Auto updating in particular is an exceedingly hard problem to solve. Besides all of the immediately obvious technical considerations (Self updating, inter-process communication, update rollback on failure) there are many problems that developers don't think about until it's too late (admin rights, Vista/7 UAC). You might be interested in the series of posts I've been writing on creating an updater from scratch: http://wyday.com/blog/ |
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cached 3 months ago
Someone from Google Switzerland wrote up a study on browser upgrades: http://www.techzoom.net/publications/silent-updates/index.en . He came to the same conclusion, namely that aggressive automatic-upgrades lead to faster distribution of the stabler more secure versions. Google seems to be taking a "website for the desktop" approach to the browser upgrades. If Google updates their homepage, the user gets the new version the next time they visit it. Ditto for their browser - the next time they start Chrome it's upgraded seamlessly without bothering the user with the details. We take the same approach as Google Chrome with our suite of updater tools (http://wyday.com/wybuild/ for anyone interested). We've found it's lead to better input (less duplicate bug reports) and faster sales turnaround. We haven't done a definitive study of our customers' customers, it'd be interesting to see if they got the same results. |