Yeah, the title and the article have very little to do with each other. Complaining about NaN semantics is especially irrelevant.
OTOH, it's funny you bring up Netscape. Yes, they shipped. Back in the Netscape 3-4 days of the Browser Wars, every new version was a crap shoot. It might un-break some page you wanted to use, but it might also be drastically slower, crash a page that you needed, lose your preferences, or whatever.
But the cool thing is that you could choose when or if to update! You could install the new version alongside the old one, try it out for awhile, and junk it if it was worse overall. If most people thought Netscape was getting worse, then most people would stick to the old, working version. Nowadays browsers follow the same "random walk" development model, but shove the latest version down most users' throats whenever they feel like it, and make it hard or impossible to revert the latest breakage. "Ship crap" combined with "software force-feeding" is good for no one but lazy coders.
So, on the one hand, I agree very much that having the options available was pretty cool.
On the other hand, having seen this repeated time and time again in the enterprise world, I don't think users should be given the option of not updating, especially for services that they aren't hosting themselves. All they end up doing is creating a support burden and being dissatisfied.
Our users are increasingly ignorant about the systems that they use--I think that precludes them from having final input about how said systems are implemented and deployed.
Since I don't support anything "enterprise," I'm probably a bit biased. Still, "creating a support burden" basically means "making more work for the developer," while "updating" almost always means "making more work for the user." I happen to use Emacs, and even though it's very slow-moving and careful about backward compatibility, I always put aside some free time for major updates, because they always break my setup somehow. And I'm lucky compared to the average software user: I'm a coder, so I can usually work around the breakage without too much trouble. Regularly making work for people without this option is inhumane.
Regarding ignorance, you know far more about how the systems work, but they probably know far more about how they use them.
I still think the auto-update treadmill is a symptom of developer arrogance, laziness, and callousness, but maybe I'm just old before my time.
OTOH, it's funny you bring up Netscape. Yes, they shipped. Back in the Netscape 3-4 days of the Browser Wars, every new version was a crap shoot. It might un-break some page you wanted to use, but it might also be drastically slower, crash a page that you needed, lose your preferences, or whatever.
But the cool thing is that you could choose when or if to update! You could install the new version alongside the old one, try it out for awhile, and junk it if it was worse overall. If most people thought Netscape was getting worse, then most people would stick to the old, working version. Nowadays browsers follow the same "random walk" development model, but shove the latest version down most users' throats whenever they feel like it, and make it hard or impossible to revert the latest breakage. "Ship crap" combined with "software force-feeding" is good for no one but lazy coders.