i can has apex?

I have to say I love the automatic updates that true multi-tenant solutions offer. Yes, that means you "have" to take the upgrade, and can't "hold off a little bit", but let me share the alternative: No upgrades.

My company migrated to Salesforce.com from an on-premise solution. Our I.S. department was concerned that they were now subject to the upgrade schedule of Salesforce.com and didn't care for that - they preferred to choose when to upgrade.

The only problem was that our I.S. department has (excessively) limited budget for upgrades. So when the estimate came back at $100K, they said "no thanks" - for two years.

So yes, automatic upgrades may come at inconvenient times (for example, right across your pilot launch week - true story!), but at least you get them - and that benefits everyone.

So I was a bit surprised when I had a negative gut reaction to this post from the Google Operating System blog about Google Chrome's Automatic Updating feature. As in "We upgrade without asking, without requiring a restart, and you can't shut it off!". I thought "I know security is important, but you can't DO THAT to people! I should have the right to choose whether and when I want to upgrade!".

Then I laughed, and considered the comparison to Software as a Service. True, it MAY cause SOME problems for SOME users for CERTAIN upgrades UNTIL a patch is released to rectify the situation, but there are two big wins here:

The first is obvious: Everyone gets the latest version and security features, making computers (and the internet in general) a safer place.

But I'm more interested in the second: Google has to ensure "unbreakable" updates - if every Chrome user is going to have this update within 5 hours, you can be sure Google has it tested up, down, backwards, and forwards! And if there is an issue, Google will be on it fast! For as Google recently discovered, the internet is a fickle place, and marketshare can be lost in a single click.

So I'm changing my tune - becoming a proponent, even - of automatic and mandatory updates for on-premise applications. Of course, I don't envy Google the task of ensuring "unbreakable" upgrades on the multitude of hardware and software combinations it needs to support - a good multi-tenant architecture is much easier to update from that perspective!

Now if only we could get Microsoft to provide a free, mandatory, and problem-free upgrade to Windows 7! OK, maybe not this time...