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<\/p>\nYou’re back from holidays, turning on a laptop for the first time in days, and, before you know it, its little fan is at full speed and everything’s running slow before it shuts down again.<\/p>\n
Later on, you’re under the pump with a critical deadline to hit, and your PC forces an update on you, and then another, and maybe a third for good measure, hitting you with the so-called blue screen of death for a good 10 minutes.<\/p>\n
Sound familiar?<\/p>\n
This is the modern era of office work, where a bid to become ultra secure with updated operating systems has made corporate-owned computers an unpredictable hotbed of stress.<\/p>\n
It seems like the machines are forever interrupting us with updates, often to install new, “shiny” software that \u2014 once you’ve endured its fourth update of the day \u2014 is often less user-friendly, less efficient, and somehow makes your job harder.<\/p>\n
So what’s going on?<\/p>\n
A high-level Adelaide-based IT expert, who has spoken on condition of anonymity, says many of the updates we endure are for security reasons.<\/p>\n
“The cyber threat now is so high, even to what it was 10 years ago, that a lot of companies are extremely risk-averse and just want to make sure their systems are secure as possible,” he said.<\/p>\n
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Most Australian office workers will be familiar with the so-called blue screen of death. (ABC News: Bang Xiao)<\/p>\n
He said corporations used to look over updates rolled out by the big tech they had enterprise agreements with and chose what was relevant to them, ignoring the others.<\/p>\n
“But I think what’s happening more and more is they’re just putting on all the available updates as there’s so many threats now, from foreign nationals, governments \u2026 someone gets hacked, and it’s out in the media in five minutes and can cause a lot of reputational damage,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It does slow things down.”<\/p>\n
One corporate manager told the ABC, tongue in cheek, that his job is now “just to sit there and do updates on my computer”.<\/p>\n
‘Shiny’ before ‘real usability’<\/p>\n
Sydney’s University of Technology Software Engineering head, Asif Gil, said changes could also be driven by revenue, regulatory compliance, or safety and maintaining a reputation \u2014 all of which could impact usability or cause a “misalignment with the business goals and operations”.<\/p>\n
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