Status-Q

There’s an amazing thing I’ve just discovered after installing an SSD in my laptop: Microsoft Office products now start up at a reasonable speed!

I’ve only just realised that, because I open them so rarely. (It’s one of the joys of working for myself that I can largely pick the tools I use.) In fact, I realise, I probably download updates for Office components more frequently than I actually use them.

That’s an interesting phenomenon; there ought to be a word for it. I’m probably unusual in having Microsoft Word work that way, but there are many of my lesser-used iOS apps that will be updated several times between successive actual executions of their code.

This is a real cultural shift from a world where big corporations would debate for months before rolling out an update to a program. On the web, we’ve grown used to the idea that a piece of software might not look quite the same the next time you log into it. But it’s now true of many apps in my pocket: something will have changed in an app before I run it again. I could quite easily pull my phone out one day and discover that last night’s update had broken something and I could no longer access the boarding pass I need for that plane…

I guess it’s a tribute to progress in software development, or perhaps to the Apple software-approval process (a real pain for developers but in many ways a boon to customers) that this so rarely happens.