Regular SOS contributor Martin Russ returns to the back page with some rabid thoughts on software updates.
One of the largest areas of growth in the software industry most recently has been the update. When you bought a program in the past, you'd use it for a while, get one or two free bug‑fixes, and then a few years later a brand new version, positively bursting with additional features and facilities, might be released — and at an affordable price for existing loyal owners. Perhaps I'm getting cynical, but this isn't quite how things appear to be now...
Major new versions of software seem to be released every year. Some manufacturers have even started calling their software by the year number: SuperBase 95, Windows 95, and so on. Just in case you thought that this was a one‑off publicity stunt, Microsoft have apparently already mentioned the imminent release of Windows 96. In fact, numbering systems have generally got out of control: Apple's System 7 was rapidly followed by 7.1, which had enough differences to make you wonder why 7 was ever released at all, and more extras and add‑ons followed with System 7.5. Windows 3.0 was replaced with 3.1, and again there were huge differences in the performance and facilities of the two products. Just to confuse matters even further, Windows 3.11 is actually a completely different product, designed to be used by groups of people rather than in isolation. Other examples include a word processor, which changed from version 2.0 to 6.0 (for reasons which are too complicated to explain here), undergoing a complete overhaul of the user interface, whereas a spread‑sheet and presentation program from the same publisher underwent a similar transmogrification, but the changes were for the worst — neat, useful little features disappeared to be replaced by subtly different, less accessible ones.
Conversely, some software manufacturers implement a reasonably sensible numbering system, but use big number changes for minor additions. Clarisworks 2.1 changed to version 3.0 in 1995, but as a long‑time user I was hard pressed to find the differences that warranted the launch of this version — there's a word count facility and some automated helpers that always seem to crash, but very little else is new. Of course, version 4.0 of Clarisworks is due out soon: about a year after version 3.0. Clarisworks is an excellent program, and I have no gripes with its performance, it's just that upgrading it so often for such minor changes makes me wonder what happened to the free 2.2 upgrade, which is what version 3.0 feels like it ought to have been.
This brings me to the vexed question of upgrade costs. I must be getting old, because I can remember when part of the huge cost of software was justified by including free support and free upgrades. You could ring the manufacturer up to ask them questions (and expect answers), and every so often you would get a disk through the post with the latest version on it. How times have changed! Nowadays you have to pay for support (the more you pay, the shorter the length of time you wait for an answer), and upgrades can cost anything from £40 up to several hundred — I've bought whole programs for £40 in the past!
You might be wondering why people still buy software upgrades if the changes are likely to be minimal, and the cost is out of proportion to the new facilities. The answer lies in that expensive support that you now pay for. If you have trouble with your software but are not running the most up‑to‑date version, the initial advice is usually to upgrade and see if the problem goes away. Sometimes upgrading one piece of software has a ripple effect on everything else. For example, the Mac's System 6 to System 7 transition rendered some older software a bit unstable, whilst Windows 95 runs Office 95 — a completely new piece of software, released just after Office 4.3.
Just because I've gone easy on the music software publishers and not mentioned anything specific, doesn't mean that I don't know who is guilty of making the most of upgrades there too!
Finally, a quick mention for some software that is getting it right. Opcode's Max 3.0 may look as if it has just acquired a new object or two, but it has actually had the timing system completely reworked. It now incorporates a very sophisticated timeline editor, which has so many creative possibilities that it makes my head spin — and considering the cost of the full version, the upgrade is reasonably priced too!