Why you shouldn’t upgrade.

It was some time ago, I was cleaning, and like anyone who cleans (and judges a book by his weight), I throw away the old (and heavy keyboard) and kept the new.

Some years later I was talking to my cousin, and he was talking about those old-school keyboards, and I said “Yes I had one of those, I throw it away…”.

After forgetting his look of contempt, I came to several realizations:

• Old keyboards were better. (See the (song) song of praises of the humble keyboard at Coding Horror.)

• There are cases in which the old is better than the new.

Which brings me to the point:

As consumers, we sometimes have this naive believe that manufactures (including software manufactures) build newer version to make our life better.

Manufactures sometimes (always) produce a new version for the following reasons:

• To reduce costs – on the first product version, on-time-delivery was all that mattered, but after that, the manufacture teams will circle like eagles around expensive parts, trying replace them with cheaper ones to “do the same thing” for more profit. they won’t usually care if the cheaper parts are shiny, smooth or fun.
• Eliminate a feature (you like) that gives the company too much headache and not enough money,
• Insert a new feature that may give the company money and annoyance to you. (replace “money” with “alignment to long tern vision” for open-source projects)
• To fix big bugs, or implement features you want. good sign that such improvements are coming, is that you and most users aren’t happy with the buggy and lacking product, or that the product is in a very tough market competition (or on the rare cases – that the manufactures really love their product, and probably use it on a daily basis, with no corporation limitations preventing them from being glorious, like DragonFlyBSD or VIM).

Also on a new version you have the risks of new and interesting bugs, not (only?) the bugs you came to love and live with, but new ones that will cost you new time to workaround.

So basically you have two kinds of products:

• Products which don’t get better in time – old mechanical wanders like dish-washers, ,washing machines, good music and 5 more items that are better old than new.
• Products that do get better in time, not necessarily from one version the next, but definitely after many versions, when new technology both finds its way in, and had enough time to be stabled.

So if you are generally happy with your product, my advice is  – don’t upgrade! (not including security updates)

Wait for a decade or two (well maybe several years) and while you’re at it, hear some good old music 🙂

Update 23.5.2013:  I allowed my Linux to self-upgrade itself, now the Virtual Machines I have inside it won’t start claiming some kernel driver isn’t installed. I knew I was right about this don’t upgrade thing… `)