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by tolien 2805 days ago
The missing part of your analogy is that in a safety-critical scenario like that, there's no way that the update to the car would be delivered alongside a change to make the UI go dark at night or a completely-rewritten version of the entertainment system. The second something went wrong with such a bundled update, the manufacturer would be annihilated by regulators around the world and/or by a collapse in consumer confidence.

MS could deliver security updates separately to feature changes but chooses not to. The Tragedy of the Commons is that well-publicised incidents like this (and the trend of updates to consumer software, supposedly under the guise of enhancing security, to bring about significant changes in appearance and behaviour) make people less, not more, inclined to defer updates to all software with the result that developers feel the urge to strong-arm users into updating.