Updates are holding back Webcasts

Does this happen to you? You want to participate in an online conference or Webcast. If you’re having a good day, you go to the appropriate Web site a bit early and check to make sure your system has all the necessary updates to work with this particular event. Or if it’s a normal day (the NHL exhibition game on the surface of hell hasn’t been postponed due to the flying pigs overhead) you scramble to log in at the last second.And what happens? You get an error message telling you your configuration isn’t up to date and you need to go download an update to Windows Media Player. Or maybe RealPlayer. I’ve pretty much given up trying to keep both of them up to date, and settled on the Microsoft one, but the same thing used to happen with the other.
If you’re lucky – or if you were having one of those rare good days and left yourself lots of time for contingencies like this – you can get this update downloaded and working without missing too much of the event (it helps that these things always start late, probably because one or two of the presenters are updating their systems so they can get online).
Web conferences and Webcasts are a great idea. They convey more information than traditional conference calls, while requiring less time, money and trouble than traveling to face-to-face meetings. And the technology has come a long way. A few years ago, images were so small, blurry and jittery as to be almost useless. They’ve become much bigger and clearer. A number of the added features are helpful. This technology is a good thing, and so are the advances it has made in the last few years.
But please, can’t we have a little continuity?
It’s almost as if every time you turn on your television, you have to upgrade the thing before you can watch a program.
The difficulty isn’t that the upgrades come too fast. It’s the fact that so many of those upgrades seem to be necessary in order to keep using the product. This doesn’t happen with, say, Microsoft Word or Excel. New versions appear, but file formats change infrequently, and if you don’t want to be bothered upgrading right away, that’s no problem. (In fact, I’ve still got a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 on my PC, and it’s still useable, though I don’t actually use it any more).
Of course free downloads are a little different from software you pay for.
Vendors know their customers will only cough up so often for paid upgrades.
Maybe the theory is that if upgrades are free, you can upgrade as often as you like. This misses the point that users’ time is not free.
The other difference with multimedia software is that it deals with content you receive from someone else.
My ancient copy of 1-2-3 still works, but would not work well for exchanging spreadsheets with someone else.
But Webmasters will tell you a well-run Web site should support the major browsers at least a couple of versions back. The same should be true when dealing with Web add-ons.
Improvements are good of course, but we can’t spend so much time upgrading our software that we get nothing else done.