I just got back from a 2 month trip of travelling. When I arrived back, my primary computer wouldn’t work anymore. Nor would my network. Even my music setup had problems.

It ended up taking a full day to update most of it and get everything working again — the way it was working before I left for my trip. And today I finished updating the final piece, my music system called Sonos. The network went down as one of the components was updating, and it now looks like that box has been corrupted and will need to be sent back.

If i have to send this box back, it will cost me $50 in outbound postage, and another $70 to receive the replacement. The box itself cost $400.

And what did I get for all these updates?

Nothing!

Absolutely nothing at all! It was just the things required to get my systems functioning.

The worst software I’ve found so far is Jing, a screencapture software for the mac. I use it every 2-3 weeks. Each time I run it, it won’t work because a “critical update” is needed. So I have to stop my workflow and update it so it works again. Every single time!?

I think the software companies are abusing easy updates online. They are concerned about the bad PR they’ll get for security vulnerabilities. So they push us to keep updating everything.

Its time this stopped! We don’t need so many updates. Schedule a date every year to be update day, say June 1. Update all your latest versions then at the same time and we’ll handle it all together. Make the security patches available to those who are compromised meanwhile. The human time cost for managing all these updates is just getting too high.