In a Twitter conversation last week, someone brought up that users are afraid of upgrades. In a sense this is true, but it is not completely true - as someone who does have the perspective of a user as well as that of a developer, I often have to stop and listen to myself as I go about trying to do things on a daily basis. It's rare for me nowadays to be able to say, "I'm going to do something" without some piece of software pestering me about an update that is available, or that I need to wait to turn off my computer because updates are being processed (shakes fist at Microsoft), or that there is some sort of patch available. If your only chore on a computer is to write software, these things are simply things that one has to do to continue writing software.
But users typically don't see it that way. Imagine you wake up in the morning and you're hungry, so you bumble into the kitchen so that you can start the coffee - or worse, to get a cup of coffee because you programmed the coffee maker to have it ready when you get into the kitchen. You arrive in the kitchen, barely awake, and begin pouring the coffee into your cup when you realize that there's no coffee. Squinting through the morning haze, you see that your coffee maker is awaiting you to press a button because there's a security update that could cause your coffee maker to do something exotically interesting. You press the button, waiting for the download and the update to complete when you move on to the toaster.
The toaster, too, refuses to do anything until you upgrade it as well. You give up. You throw some cereal in a bowl, toss some coffee grounds on it and have breakfast.
As ridiculous and humorous as that is - this is what many users see updates as. Certainly, they may be necessary for security reasons and to assure that the coffee maker doesn't catch on fire, but if it's a little download to assure that the coffee maker plays a certain tune while making the coffee, people don't care. They want their damned coffee. And that's the way it is with software. While developers typically use only certain tools and think of their users only using their software, it's much more complicated than that. People simply want stuff that works.
