Four short clippings from the trenches of recent tech developments:

Toyota today issued a recall of 1.9 million Prius cars to fix a software defect, just like GM did one month ago. One other car company was able to avoid the vast expenditure and brand damage associated with physical recalls: Tesla issued a similar software update over the air, without asking its customers to take their cars anywhere.

A teardown of a Nest thermostat in 2011 revealed an unused zigbee antenna. Nobody knew what it was for though people had their suspicions. When the Nest Protect smoke detector was released, the thermostat software was updated to integrate with the new device.

All major browsers now update silently and continuously, without asking for the user's approval. This shrinks the window of vulnerability to new attacks, and allows the platform of the web to grow and stay current. These browsers are known as evergreen browsers and the web development world can't wait till the older ones die out.

NASA sent new software to Curiosity while it was en-route to Mars. The new software was then installed on the rover after landing, replacing the flight software. The Curiosity rover is now successfully running version 11 of its software, after recovering from a failed update attempt in November.

Over the air updates are not just for your phone. Even today, they are used in cars, thermostats, mars rovers, and everything in between.

Software is eating the world, and that includes hardware itself. And software, as opposed to "firmware", needs to be kept current. For security and safety reasons, for insurance against recalls, for flexible product timelines and the ability to delay business decisions until a more opportune time, and of course for new business models such as incremental feature release.

The strong growth in hardware startups means that a new breed of developer, one used to updating their software in the cloud several times a day, will enter the formerly insulated embedded development space. They will bring with them their tools, languages, and expectations. This web-descended developer will expect hardware in the wild to behave like hardware in data centres. It's not an unreasonable request to make. With Docker and containers revolutionising the data centre, which our team has adapted to work on ARM CPUs, it's getting more realistic every day. Business and technology agree: We are moving to a world where our computer embroidered reality is always evolving and always current, without us as end users having to manually intervene to make it so.

The evergreen innovation of your browser and cloud apps is breaking through to the living room, the hospital, the manufacturing floor and transport network. Let's think about this coming reality, let's plan for it, let's manage its problems and reap its opportunities. Entreperneurial hackers and makers, start your growth engines!

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