Prior art: Project Mandarin

Project Mandarin was developed by Cornell and several universities in the
1991 to 1994 time frame. It included an application launcher that either
launched the local copy of the application or, if a new version of the
application was available from the central server, downloaded and installed
the new version before launching it. When the launcher was first loaded, it
checked to see if there was a new copy of itself and if so it downloaded it
and restarted its function with the new copy. You can find an archived
document at http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/text/CEM9448.txt.