Are forced upgrades a bad thing?

Like Hotmail users, sometimes you have no choice but to upgrade. Sometimes that’s ok, sometimes not. But you should expect it.

Transcript

This is Leo Notenboom for askleo.info.

One of the hotter topics I’m hearing about lately is the migration of MSN
Hotmail’s interface to the new “Windows Live Hotmail”. Same service, same
email, but a different user interface. From what I can tell Hotmail is
migrating users over to the new interface whether they want it or not. For a
while, particularly during Windows Live Hotmail beta, there was an option to
revert back to the old interface, but that’s apparently disappeared for most
users.

It’s fairly clear that the old “MSN Hotmail” user interface will someday
soon be a thing of the past. “Windows Live Hotmail” is the future.

And of course, that upsets some people who find the old user interface more
intuitive, easier to use, or who just don’t want to learn a slightly new way of
doing things. It doesn’t help that some features of the old interface are
either not present in the new, or are very well hidden.

My reaction, of course, is that if you don’t like the new user interface,
use this as an opportunity to take your business elsewhere. In fact,
particularly since it’s a free service, that’s about the only leverage you
have. Go get a GMail or Yahoo email account, or better yet, use this as an
opportunity to get a real email account and start using a PC-based email
program to manage your email. The list of choices is long, and after the
initial transition in the long run you’ll likely be much happier.

The question, though, is this: is forcing you to upgrade a bad thing?

In my opinion, usually not. Particularly for web-based services, improvements
should be getting made all the time, and you should absolutely expect things to
change. And doubly so for free services. Sometimes it’ll happen slowly and
sometimes more dramatically. The fact that Hotmail might have both old and new
user interfaces available for a while is nice and all, but it’s a costly
support burden for a service that, quite frankly, you’re not paying for. I’d
certainly expect the old interface to disappear.

Now, you don’t always have to change, at least not for some things – I know
of folks who are happily running desktop email programs nearly a decade old. To
a large degree you can control what you put on your desktop. But when it comes
to web-based email services – or almost any web based service – expect it to
change. In fact, I’d start to worry if it never changed, wondering if the
service wasn’t doing very well.

I’d love to hear what you think. Visit askleo.info and enter 11822 in the go
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Till next time, I’m Leo Notenboom, for askleo.info.