Online Apps are always upgraded
This one’s pretty obvious, but it’s something that is interesting, at least. In general for the software industry, getting people upgraded was an important part of the business model - I’m not talking about paid upgrades to the next major version, I’m simply talking about getting fixes and patches out to the user base. Upgrading them saves companies money, time and focus since you have less problems when you’re on the most recently patched versions.
Typically this is kind of a pain in the ass, but gradually things are getting better with the auto upgrade route. So many of my apps now ask me to upgrade that I’m annoyed when I discover a new app that doesn’t and generally speaking it always works. I upgrade when I get a chance and no problems ensue.
Even so, that’s not for everyone - I still see older versions of Firefox and Safari hitting my site, so some folks don’t get these upgrades for whatever reason. And therein lies an interesting side effect of online apps - 100% of your userbase is on the version you want them to be on, instantly. There’s no lag, there’s no supporting older, buggier versions, you roll it out and everyone’s upgraded (ok, so sometimes it takes awhile for Google’s new versions to propagate out, but you know what I mean).
That’s a really nice feature of web apps. I mean, there’s clearly many factors to consider when looking at the differences between web and desktop apps, but this one is clearly a benefit to the developer. On the other hand, this may be a minor (or major) issue for the consumer of the app since it is sometimes beneficial to stay at a certain release for compatibility’s or whatever’s sake. Sometimes a new release removes certain features that you need - with an online app, unless they make provisions to allow you access to older versions, you don’t get to decide not to upgrade.
I guess I thought of this recently first because Enquisite upgraded their offering, I logged in one day and all of a sudden there was an awesome new interface. They also happen to be one of the folks who still offer the old interface (at least for now) for those who don’t want to make the jump. And of course Google Docs recently updated their interface reasonably significantly - I’m still not sure if I really like this interface better but I can see why they did it. In general they’re moving away from trying out new interfaces and instead hewing much closer to what other apps are doing in the same space. (see also gmail trading labels for folders, bleh).
I think it’s an interesting side effect of online apps, overall, I think for most people it’s pretty positive. Keeping up with the latest can be a task that never gets done, so having it be completely automatic is probably a benefit for most. What do you think? Ever get screwed by an auto-upgrade?
