He's complaining about PCs, but I've noticed similar issues with Mac apps. They don't have a system tray to go nuts in, but half of the mac apps I run check for

He's complaining about PCs, but I've noticed similar issues with Mac apps. They don't have a system tray to go nuts in, but half of the mac apps I run check for updates at launch and bug me right when I'm trying to opens something. Some are smart enough to go ahead and do the update and tell me afterward, but they're in the minority. This feels to me somewhat like the Vista shutdown menu. The programmers writing the individual apps aren't asking themselves "what if there were six apps like ours all asking to update constantly?" Come to think of it, this tends to be a pretty major theme in software development: ignoring user experience when other people's code is involved. Opportunity for improvement!