Rants

Posted on 8 May 2008 at 10:22

 

Gallery

...Simon Brew worries that updates foisted on users by software companies are all too visible.

Adobe Reader has fresh updates available. Would I like Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition to be installed at the same time?

No.

Your download purchase is complete. Would you like to pay an extra £2 so that we can protect your registration information?

No.

You're about to download Safari, a web browser that's no better than the one you've got on your PC (and in many ways worse). Is that OK?

No. No, it isn't.

That's this week's batch. But as anyone who regularly has to install, reinstall, update or remove software can testify, it's the proverbial tip of the iceberg. From uninstallers deciding you need to be directed to a webpage to tell the publisher why you're getting rid of its shoddy software, through to unnecessary add-ons being thrust at you with abandon, IT is an industry in which the stupid question with limited answers prevails.

Power down

Take CyberLink's PowerDVD suite, a software package I hold in some regard. When I load it, it asks me if I want to register now or later. But where's the button that says 'I'll never register a piece of software whose job is simply to play discs when I tell it to'? I couldn't find it anywhere, and I suspect you can't, either.

Questions such as this encompass a level of presumption that borders on the insulting, but it's nothing compared with the abuse of users' trust that automatic update systems are using right now. These are the routines that don't bother to ask you the stupid question at all, save for a tickbox or something of that ilk when you install the program. But when you do give a program permission to hunt down and apply essential updates without confirming with you every time, is it too much to ask that these updates are, well, essential?

Microsoft, for instance, foisted Internet Explorer 7 and its famed Windows Genuine Advantage utility on any user who left Automatic Updates unattended, whether you wanted a new web browser or security tool or not. As I use Firefox and a legal copy of Windows, why do I need either of these? I don't, but somewhere on a PowerPoint presentation in Microsoft HQ, there was once some smart-suited executive who decided that these were essential to me.

Light relief

It's unfair just to cite Microsoft. I was pleased to see, for instance, that its new Silverlight 1.0 plug-in was listed as an optional update, though I retain some discomfort about it being offered at all through a system designed to keep your operating system up to date.

Unfortunately, a growing number of software publishers are seeing it as the accepted norm that they can commandeer your internet connection, not for the purpose of legitimate updates, but to try to sell new things to you. This, along with the increasingly presumptive nature of dialog boxes, shows a worrying disdain - and a lack of respect - for the very people who fund these companies in the first place: the consumers.

Given that we stump up the money to keep these firms in business, is it too much to ask to have a dialog box that always has a No option in it somewhere?

Author: Simon Brew