Is Newer Necessarily Better?

Until a few years ago, I believed that people should surpass being leading edge – opting instead to be bleeding edge. It was almost comic around the office. Within 15 minutes after a vendor released a product version or fix, all you'd see of John was rear end and elbows until the version or fix was installed.

It's common knowledge that age changes a lot of things. More often than not, it causes us to slow down. It should make us wiser because we've benefitted from a lot of observations and mistakes over years of work. Age should make us more cautious because we neither have the energy nor can we afford – you know all you young bumpkins are watching us and waiting for us to make a fatal mistake – to make mistakes we took in stride twenty years ago.

Several good friends and a few very good clients have recently asked me about my philosophy when it comes to applying vendor supplied maintenance; and when they should migrate to newer and better product versions and desktops. In that regard, I have a few guidelines – a started to say rules but I think guideline is better because it leaves room for exceptions.

• I have Automatic Update activated on all my personal Windows desktops; but on none of my JFSI business desktops. I used to have it active across the board, and doing it the way I'm now doing it introduces a risk that I'll miss automatically installing a critical security patch. But I'll cover that in a second.
  
• I set things this way because I've twice or thrice been burned by bad fixes that cost time and/or money to back off. Plus, activating automatic update eliminates you having the option of applying fixes or not. Thank God for System Restore points. A bad fix applied to one of the systems at home is a nuisance, but it's rarely a crisis.
  
• What about new product versions? I considered myself to be on Office 2003 Power User. In fact, several people asked me to rate myself and I gave myself an 85% score when I came to using products in the Office 2003 Suite. After a year on Office 2007 I'd rate myself maybe at 60-65%, and that's pretty darned generous. I find it cumbersome, clumsy, non-intuitive and a real impediment to performance. Why? Only because I was so darned comfortable with the previous versions and change of the magnitude introduced by Office's ribbons is hard to cope with.
  

Vista is yet another story. I have a couple of Vista based machines; and I'm getting used to it. You'll note I did not say I LIKE it; but I'm finding it more tolerable, just as I'm finding Office 2007 more tolerable. I rue the day, however, when Bill and company decide that XP will no longer be available on PCs being installed in small to medium sized businesses along side other XP machines. I predict something only slightly short of a major revolution when that occurs.

So to net things out….

• I now TEST updates before just taking the vendor's word that they're necessary UNLESS the vendor can show real reason. If it is truly a MAJOR security breach and the vendor can prove the fix damages nothing else, great; but I've adopted a more "guilty until proven innocent" attitude with respect to updates.
  
• I generally run one level behind or at least wait a few weeks after a major update so that others can find the bugs. It just allows me to sleep better at night.