'Many of the updates address emerging security threats rather than simply adding 'nice-to-have' feature extensions. ' commodities like browsers or operating systems, non-technical consumers may well be best served by automatic updates,' said Sebastian Holst, chief marketing officer of PreEmptive Solutions, a company that helps customers monitor and manage their software. With that change, along with the spread of computing technology to so many corners of our lives, the burden of maintaining it shifts to the software maker. In short, a lot of software is becoming a constant work in progress rather than a finished product. But the Internet Age has enabled not just digital distribution, but frequent distribution, and programmers are following suit with a more continual stream of smaller updates. In days of yore, software came on disks manufactured and shipped at some expense to customers. Should this really be my job? Automatic updates can cause compatibility problems and yield control to corporations whose agendas may differ from your own, but used judiciously, I think it's an improvement. In the last week or so, I've manually updated Google's Chrome, Chrome Canary, and Picasa Adobe Systems' Flash Player, Photoshop, Premiere, and AIR Microsoft Windows 7 and Office 2008 for the Mac Apple Aperture Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird Opera and Evernote. How many times a week do you see a software update dialog box like this? Either way, the practice is increasingly common.

Driven by Google and like-minded software makers, a new era is dawning in which your software is constantly refreshed-often without any intervention on your part at all.ĭepending on how you see things, that could be either a scary loss of control over your own computer or a boon to convenience and security.

Updating office 2008 for mac