An Update for Your Software is Available: Do You Really Want It Yet?

Most businesses who rely on commercial software to manage their business information recognize that keeping their software up to date is generally a good thing.  Bug fixes and feature enhancements are often delivered to licensed users in the form of interim or point releases, allowing users to benefit from recent developments immediately rather than waiting for an entirely new version to be released.  More frequently, software developers are using the Internet to provide real-time notifications to customers that program updates are available, and many software products even encourage the user to download and install the updates as soon as they become available.

In previous years, when the Internet wasn’t quite so available and useful, software companies distributed their products on CDs and disks.  Technical people would usually manage the software installations, because the process wasn’t necessarily simple or straight forward, and end-users were not really involved.  This usually gave the business at least some foundation to recover from a bad software update – by performing the initial installation on test systems, creating system backups prior to update installation, and other methods.  Today, the end-user is often among the first to know about an available software update, and may even be the one who obtains and triggers the update installation (often without IT involvement).

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