Why

[james_davis_nicoll]

Do so many companies seem to feel the need to upgrade their products into unusability?

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Inverted Peter Principle?

[dsgood]

Progress is good!

Change, progress -- same thing, isn't it?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Is this a Windows 8 thread?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

More general than that.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

For example, remember when Technorati was useful? And someone I game with has a number of issues with the new version of Word (short version: I am happy I use Open Office).

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I hated the new version of Word... but now I like it.

To be fair the 'new' version of Word has been around since 2007.

[jwgh]

Bah, Word 5 for Mac was the high-water mark. Though actually I remember when that came out I thought it was bloated and slower than Word 4, but I later changed my mind.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

I immediately thought of AVG. Used to be pretty good piece of antivirus software back in the day. But it bloated into unusability about five years back and developed a nasty habit of not playing nicely with the other kids to boot.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's a variation of the Peter Principle, I think.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

There was this open-source media player called amarok that -- several years ago -- would interface beautifully with my mp3 player for uploads, allow me to update mp3 metadata, and was easy to create playlists on.

The new, mandatory major upgrade removed all the mp3 player interface sections, and was highly unintuitive.

So I dropped it completely.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I am confused: "open-source software" conjoined with "mandatory major upgrade"?

Mandatory why? How? According to whom?

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Generally "I want to upgrade something else on my system, and that requires upgrading all the base libraries to the versions it requires, and that requires upgrading amarok to the new version that uses those base libraries." Doing an upgrade at all is optional, but if you want to upgrade one thing, upgrading the rest to match is mandatory.

Sure, you could figure out how to recompile the version of amarok you're used to with the new libraries so you don't have to go through all that, but who has the time?

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Or you could just rebuild the tool you don't want to upgrade, statically, to avoid this issue.

[(Anonymous)]

that version of amarok continues in existence as clementine. (If I am infering the version referenced correctly.)

-- Graydon

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I will try it out.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Nothing says "buy stock in headache remedies" quite like open source software interfaces.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

It's easy to point fingers at lots of open source software and the process under which it's written and deployed and disseminated, but honestly, I don't see much of a measurable difference in the quality, across the field as a whole, between open source, and closed source, software.

If the open source movement is guilty of anything it's making clear that the cost of robust, free, open software is that the creation space must also permit cohabitation with flaky, fragile, horribly maintained, free, open software whereas closed source, for-profit businesses can afford to sweep those kinds of things (mostly) into the dark closets of their own hallways before the public ever sees them.

Frankly, all things being equal, if I had to have the fruits of only one model or the other, I'd chose what the open source world has produced. Luckily, we don't, yet, have to make that choice.

[dsrtao]

Open source software *not* written for end-users tends to have much better install and config procedures than closed source. Web servers, that sort of thing.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

In the main, I agree. But for the most part, I'd also maybe suggest that the notion of "software written for end-users" can be largely thought of as a way for closed-source, for-profit vendors to package and sell their IP to customers that don't largely need most of the stuff in the package. Sort of like how cable companies argue that only by selling you 45 TV channels you have no interest in ever watching can they afford to sell you the 5 that you really do have an interest in.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Because their share-holders tell them they must.

[jwgh]

If you don't change things, how do you justify your salary?

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

You forgot to put quotes around the word "upgrade".

[glaurung-quena.livejournal.com]

My crackpot theory: some (OK, many) companies don't understand why they can't have 100% of the market. They don't understand that not only do different people want different things, but different people want *mutually exclusive* things. So, in pursuit of 100% of the market, they end up creating a mugwump product that pisses off everyone to a greater or lesser degree.

If product X is popular and is used by 2/3 of the people who need function Y, the corporate instinct of the manufacturer of product X is to run focus groups and polls and so on to find out what it is that those 1/3 not using product X want. Then they implement those things, whatever they are, no matter how discordant they are with the previously existing features of the product. Then, they discover to their dismay that their existing customers hate the new features with a passion, and wonder why.

The example that springs to mind is Microsoft, which has been pursuing the fraction of people who have never used Windows before for 20 years now (despite the fact that that fraction of people has shrunken down to be pretty much exclusively "people who will never grok computers"), which is why each version of windows and office has been ever-more festooned with training wheels and hand-holding guidance guaranteed to piss off existing users who already know how to get things done and don't need or want those training wheels getting in the way.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

I think all companies, either implicitly or explicitly, want All The Money.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Ooo, don't get me started on that. I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out why my wife's laptop suddenly won't connect to the home network. Even called her brother, an IBM tech, to try and help. Tried connecting the computer directly to the router, then the satellite modem, then adjusting the settings, checking if it was a problem with a Windows security update...

Then, I notice that McAffee "Security" Suite had an update the day the computer stopped working properly. Once I uninstalled that fucking overgrown virus, of course the problem goes away.

When you think about it, it is a very good security feature. Want to stop bad things from coming over the internet? Prevent the computer from connecting to the internet at all. Bastards.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

My absolute bugbear. I use an email software that seems to confuse everybody into oblivion because it isn't common - but when I began using it it was NICE and SIMPLE and it just WORKED. Then I upgraded computers and the OS and of course the old version of my email program wouldn't play nicely. So I had to go to the new version. Verdict *BROKEN*, baby. Just give me back my nice simple interface which was all I wanted.

Gark. Upgrades. Hates them, preciousssss. hatesssssss.

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

This is exactly why whenever I do writing, I do it in Notepad. You can't upgrade Notepad.

[(Anonymous)]

Notepad was upgraded some time back. (The 64k limit on file sizes was removed.)

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

This is why I turn automatic upgrades off on everything. Recently I upgraded Winamp manually and I notice the way the software reads the file is now different than it used to be, so all the names I've given my files are ignored and it only reads the "internal" file info, meaning I have to manually go into properties and change and ARGGGGH. Stupid Winamp.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Why you so sad! Software is better! Human should change to adapt!

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

To be fair, whatever mimetype/header/magic bytes thing Winamp uses should take precedence over the filename. There's no reason to have to force users to change their properties though.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Why? Honest question. I don't understand why it's better to read the filename the mp3 is given when I rip a CD or download from a store, rather than the filename I've assigned to it.

The filename given when I rip a song off CD is usually truncated and often misspelled. (Not as often as misspellings on DVD chapters though. Sheesh, those are bad.)

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

I might have misunderstood, I thought by 'internal file info' you meant something other than the filename and extension. If it's just being picky about the filename itself then that's just dumb.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the real terms are, which is the problem. Sorry.

On an mp3, I right click -> properties -> details. Winamp used to use what was in the File Name section at the bottom of that screen, which was easily editable by just changing the filename in Windows Explorer. Now Winamp pulls what's in Description instead, and you can't change that -- or at least I have no idea how -- without right clicking and editing the details screen manually on each file.

When I rip a file or download after buying it, Description is already filled in with whatever the company put in there, which is often not what I want at all.

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

My current despair: the upgrade to Kobo, and Calibre's inability to see Kobo's database anymore.

(I don't consider the solution of downgrading Kobo's database to be valid, and I'm guessing that Rakuten hasn't released the API yet, so a Calibre upgrade doesn't solve anything either.)

Topical webcomic.

[rpresser.livejournal.com]

http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2012/8/23/how-to-get-to-the-root-cause-of-your-irritation.html