Adrian Kingsly Hughes over at ZDnet [1] hits very close to where I live, since I’m a end user support type:
On Friday I posted briefly about yet another potential problem with Windows Update [2] (my ZDNet blogging colleague Mary Jo Foley covered the issue in greater detail here [3] and here [4]). Initial investigations of PCs at the PC Doc HQ have turned up no leads but I have discovered something else that broken about Microsoft Windows Update mechanism – trust.
See, here’s the problem. To feel comfortable with having an open channel that allows your OS to be updated at the whim of a third party (even/especially* Microsoft … * delete as applicable) requires that the user trusts the third party not to screw around with the system in question. This means no fiddling on the sly, being clear about what the updates do and trying not to release updates that hose systems. While any and all updates have the potential to hose a system, there’s no excuse for hiding the true nature of updates and absolutely no excuse for pushing sneaky updates down the tubes. Over the months vigilant Windows users have caught Microsoft betraying user trust on several separate occasions and this behavior is eroding customer confidence in the entire update mechanism.
This is a water cooler argument that I’ve made several times over the past year. The loudest objection that I had was the pushing of IE7 by Microsoft as a critical update, as opposed to an optional one. the problem was, at the time, I was supporting a number of people who were running a program which would not run correctly on IE7, but did on IE6. After months of internal back and forth, and back and forth with Microsoft, who swore up and down that they would not be pushing IE7 as an critical update, imagine my annoyance when I came into work one morning and found that it had in fact been pushed is a critical, and I now had every desktop in the place effectively out of action.
If Microsoft wants to know why so many people are so very unknowing with them in terms of what is perceived as their arrogance, this is a primary example.
Since that time, I’ve seen a number of systems come up which ultimately take the update process out of Microsoft’s hands. I use one of them here at Casa De Bit. it downloads the updates from Microsoft as Microsoft makes them available, but waits until I clear them, before installing them across the LAN, here. generally speaking, I refuse to clear anything until such time as a week as gone by, so as to ensure that I will not have smoking hulks waiting for me when I arrive, as I did the morning of the IE7 push.
At the bottom line of the reason behind all this extra mechanism is an issue of trust. or, more correctly, the lack thereof. Given that they are just about the only player in town, any more, Microsoft probably feels a certain immunity to these customer trust issues. It’s not like the customer has a great deal of choice in the matter. But after a certain amount of broken trust, other solutions to various problems have a tendency to arise rather quickly.
Come to think of it, that line could be applied in the political world, as well, given the trust that’s been broken by Congressional Democrats… And likely, will, come November next.