On the Usefulness of self-extracting Archives

I just found out that the new firmware version 2.1 for my digital camera Panasonic Lumix LX3 has been published. Very nice, especially the speed improvements.

So I downloaded the firmware, a self-extracting archive, started the executable and had it uncompress the actual firmware file (a .bin file). Interestingly, the “compressed” .exe file is larger than the uncompressed .bin file:

LX3 firmware size

So why, o gods of common sense, make the file available as an executable, which might even be blocked by company policy or virus scanners?

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