I have always assumed that miss-leading your users and making them jump through many hoops is a bad things. MS appear to disagree.

I had to play with a Windows machine in work yesterday to test some stuff on IE. IE of course made a pigs ear of things. Thing is it was making such an abnormal pigs ear of things that I wondered whether IE was properly up to date so I ran Windows Update to be sure I had the latest version.

My mistake was probably to listen to the advice Windows Update gave me. It advised me to switch to Microsoft Update because it was better, so I clicked on the button to do so. It went off and installed some stuff and then started it's standard "checking your computer for updates" routine which took a staggering 15 minutes.

At the end of that it told me it couldn't do my updates till I updated the updater that I'd just installed seconds earlier (why didn't it install the updates while it was doing the initial install?) so I let it at it. It went off and did it's thing for ages and then told me that my machine was up to date. I didn't believe it. I was pretty sure all that had been updated was the updater and not my OS or my software. I was right! When I ran Microsoft Update again 10 critical and 8 other updates made themselves known. That doesn't sound very 'up to date' to me! MS Update lied to me!

I let it do it's thing again and it took ages again, installed the 18 updates, told me my system was now up to date and told me to reboot. I did, and then, for the giggle, I ran Microsoft Updater again …. guess what, ANOTHER critical update came out of the woodwork! That's twice I was told my machine was up to date when it wasn't within the space of an hour! It also took me an hour to update my machine which was only about a month or so out of date and that too seems very wrong.

Good UIs do not lie to the user! My machine was open to all sorts of nasty attack yet Microsoft Updater told me I was up to date when I wasn't. That's just a poor show from a poor app by a poor company. Add to that the ridiculously long time the updates took and you are just left with a HCI nightmare. It doesn't have to be like that! I generally live in Apple Land and Apple's Software Update has been doing what Microsoft Update now does for years. It updates both my OS and my Apps. However, it does it much quicker and with a much simpler UI and it tells the truth!

Note

This post was initially posted to my old blog here. Comments may no longer be posted there and should be posted here instead but there are still some old comments at the old location that people may be interested in reading.