Why I Hate Upgrades

A couple of good examples come from my own experience and from the experience of others.

• When PayCycle customers tried to upgrade from Quicken 2004 to Quicken 2005, they could no longer download their payroll transactions from PayCycle to Quicken. That was because Intuit had abandoned the QFS file transfer format, and apparently the company has no plans to reinstate it.

• Quicken 2005 lost track of my own online payments, and Intuit tech support could not figure out how to get it to remember them. Their recommendation was to revert to Quicken 2004.

• Outlook 2003 disabled my Sony Clie's ability to communicate with Outlook. It took a serious effort at reverse-kludging (not the same as reverse engineering) to fix the problem.

• Symantec's Norton Antivirus 2005 disabled my Netgear MP101 digital music player's ability to find its disk database on my server, and also disables the ability of installation programs, such as Hewlett-Packard's multifunction printer programs, to communicate with the computers on a network. I was finally put in touch with a senior tech at Symantec who advised that I disable the product's worm protection, which he said is safe to do because the product's AutoProtect feature provides more than adequate protection.

Bottom Line?

I could go on, but I'm sure you could as well. If there is a bottom line here, it is that if your users don't absolutely need to use features in a new version of a product, don't upgrade it. There will be times when they will have to, and there will be times when you will be compelled to upgrade because the version your users are using is no longer going to be supported.

When it comes to operating systems, if you or your employees are compelled to try out the latest and greatest, bite the proverbial bullet and buy new computers to do that with. You'll probably wind up with new versions of many applications as well, all installed for you, running smoothly, and running compatibly.

And when it comes to applications, unless you're really compelled to upgrade, just don't do it.

John Dickinson is editor of SmartCompany.com, a Ziff-Davis Media web site.