The Weird New World of Hardware Fixes

Good news! All products are now perpetual works in progress.

Click here to read additional Full Disclosure columns by Contributing Editor Stephen Manes. He has been writing about technology for more than two decades.

Thank the Net for endless software updates. Some programs--such as antivirus utilities and Windows itself--let you get them automatically. More often, as with drivers, you have to find new versions on your own.

Hardware updates and fixes used to be confined to computers' BIOS firmware. If you kept checking back with the manufacturer, you might eventually find the bytes you needed to reflash the ROM. If you didn't check, maybe you'd be lucky and have no trouble. Or maybe you'd have trouble but never suspect the all-important BIOS. One thing was certain: The manufacturer would never contact you to tell you an upgrade was available.

Today some computer makers do send you alerts about BIOS fixes. But just about every other piece of hardware--from cell phones to routers--has reprogrammable ROM in it, too. Hardware makers have begun to treat their products like software, releasing unfinished versions and planning for eventual fixes and features that should have been included in the first place. And once again, you'll never find out about most of these updates unless you assiduously seek them.

At a recent trade show, a company rep assured me that a forthcoming camera with a Wi-Fi option would handle WEP encryption. Nice, except that WEP is hopelessly broken. So what about the far safer WPA? A postrelease upgrade, date unknown, would handle that, the rep said. Translation: We're not about to hold this thing up till we get it right. We'll let our customers find, download, and install the security fix when it's ready.

Same story with portable music players that handle Windows Media files. Napster currently offers a great-sounding deal: a $15-per-month subscription plan that gives you access to over a million songs and lets you transfer them to players that support Windows Media copy protection. (For more, see "Napster Adds Mobile Music Subscriptions.") Alas, as I write, virtually no music players on the market support this feature. How will you get it? Via firmware upgrade. How will you find out about that? Esteemed customer, we leave that to you.

With software, this dance has been going on forever. My very first software purchase, a 1982 copy of WordStar, urged me to register it, so I did. When WordStar offered an upgrade that worked properly with the version of DOS I owned, did the company use the registration info to alert me to the improvement? Three guesses.

Much of the hardware that crosses my desk--printers, music players, you name it--eventually needs upgrading. Either the device firmware is faulty or incomplete, or the drivers are. But I can't recall many times when a company used my registration info to tell me about an upgrade--unless it was asking me to pay for it.

If hardware companies are going to knowingly sell incomplete products, they can damn well develop databases that use registration data to notify you when updates are available. This may have been a problem in the era of paper registration cards; in the Web era, there's no reasonable excuse.

But don't expect hardware manufacturers to pay attention. When I pointed out the problem to software companies in the early eighties, they turned a deaf ear to me. It has taken till now for Bill Gates to announce a single update service designed to offer automatic fixes not just for Windows but for other Microsoft applications, such as Office.

Will it give you a hand with hardware fixes? Three more guesses.