The Latest Trumors |
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by Beverly Rosenbaum |
There is a new kind of commercial software emerging — dubbed Dribbleware.
"Your next operating system may arrive in patchwork bits and
pieces, perhaps even without your involvement,"
Fred Langa, Editorial
Director of Windows Magazine, wrote in his column last October.
And that column triggered a flood of mail from readers on the subject.
He described "Dribbleware" as the increasingly common practice of releasing piecemeal upgrades and patches for Win95 and related applications: Instead of getting a fresh new version of your OS or application, you get a sporadic trickle of updated drivers, DLLs, add-ons and such. He believes that the core idea is fine — "it's great always to have the latest version of everything." But he also feels that it has gotten out of hand. "One reader told me he has over 44MB of downloaded patches and updates; my own collection has now grown to over 38 MB of files. Other readers wrote that the size of their patch collection exceeds the size of the originally installed operating system." Langa added, "What a pain in the patch."
He pointed out that the major inconvenience in dealing with Windows 3.x systems was downloading new drivers, patches, and bug-fixes. Frequent online pilgrimages to hardware vendors' BBS were necessary to download drivers for more advanced peripherals such as cutting-edge video or sound cards. Eventually, you'd end up installing patches on top of patches on top of patches.
This very problem was something that Windows 95 was supposed to fix.
But, as Langa puts it, "the Law of Unexpected Consequences kicked in, and Win95 itself has become patch-happy—a crazy-quilt OS with literally dozens of bug-fixes, corrections, upgrades, add-ons, extensions and enhancements available."
Within months of shipping Win95, Microsoft released a free-for-the-download "Service Pack 1" at http://www.msn.com/download/windows/setup.exe to address the worst of the bugs, incorporating nine separate patches.
But the Service Pack didn't fix all the bugs or shortcomings in Win95—and it even introduced a few new bugs of its own, requiring a new cycle of bug-fixes and updates. No less than 10 newer patches can be accessed at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/software/updates.htm .
"But wait," writes Langa, "there's more. Over at http://www.microsoft.com/kb/softlib/, you'll also find page after page after page of new printer drivers, display drivers, network drivers, modem drivers, audio drivers, input device drivers, storage drivers, and numerous other files, drivers, and utilities. There are hundreds of files there."
The story is the same for Windows NT and Microsoft Office, with hundreds more files in their respective update areas.
The column goes on to say that if you do manage to stay fully up to date, your copy of Win95 could end up being very, very different from your neighbor's. This can drive system administrators and front-line technicians nuts because it makes diagnosing problems and supporting users much more difficult. It's no better for those who maintain their own systems. If the OS needs to be reinstalled, the core files must be installed first and then all the upgrades in the correct order, rebuilding the whole patchwork OS from bottom to top.
Langa describes the problem as being so bad that commercial stealth-upgrade services like "Oil Change" have been developed. These products try to help by taking inventory of your system, noting the versions of all the software you're using, and then periodically dialing into a central database to see if newer versions have become available. Some even can auto-download and install the newer drivers. You'll end up with a system that can update itself — that's the "stealth-upgrade" part. Some of them try to let you backpedal out of an upgrade that goes awry. (If uninstalls worked properly all the time, he feels this might be a fine approach.) You may not even know your system's been updated until something breaks and you don't know why. (Do you really want that?)
"This auto-update approach may mesh with a long-rumored Microsoft plan to move its software to a subscription model: you buy software once, but then pay a maintenance fee each year and get continually-updated patches as they become available. It would be great for Microsoft. Think of the millions they'd save in packaging, printing, duplicating and shipping of disks, CDs and manuals," Langa continued.
This sounds convenient until you realize that you may not need or want every new software update or driver that comes along. For example, as hardware ages, there's usually a point at which you want to freeze the drivers and not install later versions. Or, you may have a dual-boot setup where you specifically want to keep an older, non-upgraded version of the OS around for compatibility or other reasons. In these and many other cases, installing the newest drivers can leave you with a broken system and no clue as to what's wrong—especially if the system underwent a stealth upgrade you don't know about.
Langa believes that piecemeal releases of software, wide public betas of new programs, and the proliferation of downloadable bug-fixes and patches are fundamentally changing the way we buy, install, and maintain software. "Dribbleware isn't going away: In fact, it's taking over." The flood of mail he received on the subject showed that most readers were equally alarmed.
However, a vocal minority believes that "dribbleware" is good. "People clamor for bug fixes and feature enhancements as soon as possible. When vendors try to deliver them as patches or interim updates, they complain of `dribbleware'. The alternative is to wait until all of the patches are wrapped up into the next scheduled release, an equally unacceptable choice," wrote one reader.
"But the ability to dribble out updates takes the pressure off vendors to finish a new version," opined another reader. "That `next scheduled release' can drift into the indefinite future. When that happens, we can only either deal with the hassles of dribbleware or live with the hassles of bugs."
Other readers think dribbleware also takes the pressure off software developers in the critical area of quality. They felt the cost of producing the software is lower — no need to spend money on proper pre-release testing because the customers will do it for free.
The latest patch available for Microsoft Word fixes the inability to share Word 97 files with the previous version. (The "You can never go back" syndrome.) Users who had already upgraded to Word 97 found the only option to share files with users of previous versions of Word was to save the file as a Rich Text File (.RTF) format, which created a much larger file than the original. The Microsoft Word 97 Converter is available either on the Office 97 Professional CD (\Valupack\ Wrd97cnv\ Wrd97cnv.exe) or free from http://www.microsoft. com/kb/softlib/mslfiles/WRD97CNV.EXE. The converter converts documents from Microsoft Word 97 format to Word 95 (v. 7) as well as Word 6.x for Windows, Windows NT, and the Macintosh. To install the converter, first shut down any running instances of Word (including Exchange if you use WordMail) and just double-click Wrd97cnv.exe, following the prompts from there. The setup also places an informative document Wrd97cnv.doc in the \MSOffice\Winword folder. This document provides an extensive table of backward conversion issues.
Beverly Rosenbaum is a HAL-PC member.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.
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