Are forced automatic updates in software a good thing?

Yesterday, I went to my local internet provider to complain about an issue with my internet connection. I went in to see this guy making a cup of coffee. Then he sat down in front of his PC which was running windows XP. As I explained my issue, he opened internet explorer and below his address bar were three toolbars (Yahoo toolbar, MSN toolbar, and some other one). I directly thanked myself I was running Firefox on Linux. I finished explaining my issue and he picked up the phone to make a phone call. While he was on the phone, internet explorer froze so he minimized it and opened Firefox. Then he started mumbling that he has to use this other program most of the time because Internet Explorer keeps hanging. Then I noticed that it was the old Firefox 0.8 (the first Firefox release after it was rebranded). I thought to myself “Firefox 0.8?? This guy must be missing a huge amount of security updates.” Then he finished the phone call and told me that my issue will be resolved in less than 5 minutes. I thanked him and as I stepped out, I asked him: “Do you like Firefox?” He answered: “What’s that?”. Then I said: “Nevermind” and Ieft.