wyday

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"How fast do people upgrade to new browsers"
7 points by wyday 4 months ago | link | top
cached 4 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.

"The four essential laws of software updates"
1 point by wyday about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 2 months 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/

"Implementing a partial serial number verification system"
5 points by wyday 13 days ago | link | parent | top
cached 13 days ago
This is exactly right - licensing exists for enforcing contracts. Weak systems (e.g. serial-only licensing) results in actual lost sales. It's not always malicious thieving - mostly it's just inefficient bureaucracy.

This means you should either protect your software using hardware dongles, or online activation. Hardware dongles are a pain in the ass and will increase your support costs, but some companies prefer them.

Nadam, if you're looking for licensing and online activation we're the makers of LimeLM (http://wyday.com/limelm/ ). Or you can build your own. But we do offer entrepreneur friendly pricing.

"Symantec: it’s dangerous to rely on free antivirus"
1 point by wyday about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 2 months 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/

"Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension"
4 points by wyday about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 4 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.

"Chrome's Flash integration results in 7x faster security update"
8 points by wyday 17 days ago | link | parent | top
cached 16 days ago
Our company makes wyBuild: http://wyday.com/wybuild/ . It comes in 3 parts (wyBuild, wyUpdate, and the AutomaticUpdater control). wyBuild makes the tiny update patches, wyUpdate is the open source updater (BSD licensed) and the AutomaticUpdater control is the open source control that adds the ability for fully automatic updates (LGPL Licensed).

Here are the links to the source code, for those interested:

wyUpdate: http://wyday.com/wyupdate/

AutomaticUpdater: http://code.google.com/p/automatic-updater/ (instructions: http://wyday.com/wybuild/help/automatic-updates/ )

"Spolsky: Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives"
9 points by AndrewWarner about 1 year ago | link | top
cached 5 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.

I love this article. Thanks for posting it wyday.

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