Auto Updates are Sapping our Nation's Strength

OK, Veep debate, yawn. I've got something important to talk about. An Andy Roonie moment, if you will.

If you use a computer to any extent, by now you've gotten used to automatic updates. I just got one today from Apple, offering to update the updater software itself. Not any actual product, mind you, but the software that is supposed to update the product (Quicktime, in this case) that you happen to be using.

I'm probably fairly typical in that I get about one of these little gems every three days. A good part of the time they require that my system be rebooted. I do my work on my computer, so there's generally a lot of stuff running, so shutdown. Call the basic shutdown time 7 minutes.

Then the reboot happens, and another set of updaters check with Mamma to see if they need any updates - my HP printer driver does this. So about 1/3 of the time, I am invited to reboot again. Let's add 2 more minutes, and our total is 7 + 2 = 9 minutes.

And to get everything started up again, as it was before, 7 minutes. Total 7 + 2 + 9 = 16 minutes time spent to update.

17 minutes every three days comes out to 17/3 * 365 = 34 hours per year. I'm going to assign an average value of 40 dollars per hour for our time, as Americans, bringing the total dollar cost of these updates to $1378.00 per year.

According to one study there are about 1 computers for every 10 people in America. Since there are 300 million people, that's 30 million computers. This brings our grand total to just over 30,000,000 * 1378 = 30 billion dollars a year, just for wasted time due to automatic updates.

Automatic updates are a sort of "time tax" that is taken out of the hide of each and every one of us who sits and waits for these silly updates to happen. Thirty billion dollars a year ain't hay.

What can you do? Plenty. I suggest that you finish an automatic update, check your calendar. If the date is an odd number, take an extra minute, and fire off an email to the manufacturer of the software that is asking for the update to:

1) Allow automatic updates to be disabled completely, and rely only on manual updates.
2) Notify you ahead of time if a restart will be required.
3) Provide an option to check for updates at night, and reboot automatically

Spread the word - 30 billion a year is not pocket change.