I agree with the idea of full ownership, but I also know it wasn't all that long ago that the user stuck on an old version of IE was the bane of most developers, and that many security vulnerabilities come from software that was patched years ago.
Users weren't running IE6 for years and years because they upgraded to something newer, and decided to go back. The solution to this problem didn't come from making upgrades a purely one-way process.
Device makers have become quite opinionated about how their things are used, and they are in a position to enforce their opinions. I don't know what exactly the right balance is, because there are genuine interests to be balanced... but when a piece of hardware is designed explicitly to allow the manufacturer to remove the device's ability to run the exact same software that it used to, we should meet any claim that this is primarily for the user's advantage with great skepticism. We should also take seriously the possibility that tilting the balance of power in this way creates issues at least as bad as the ones we are hoping to resolve.
It's like a city so fearful of petty criminals, it allows the police the ability to do as they please. And the police are directly hired by the rich people in town.
Not too long ago I was still supporting old versions of IE because employees for large chain we built software for would not allow them to upgrade their computers
Probably because they had some other expensive software that only worked with old IE versions. The cost of fixing the other software was probably more than what it cost to pay you to support yours.
Maybe. It's also likely that they just don't allow any changes. Manual updates require action, automatic updates require no action. People default to no action and it requires a fair amount of effort to get someone to take action.
