I freely admit to being overly suspicious (by experience, not by nature), and the indications to me are that Garmin is tightening things up by introducing GE. I don't grieve the passing of LifetimeUpdater 'coz the program never worked properly anyway in my experience. I note dasilvarsa's observation 'Garmin Express will only update maps to the Unit at the Moment'. That sounds hopeful of a change in the future and time will tell. But if their policy is hardening towards tighter control of their maps, eliminating installations on computer so that the only way to instal the whole or parts of a map are at the time of dl direct to unit/sd of .img files is not a bad place to start.

I only hope that later versions of GE don't seek and destroy Mapupdater as well. Or that they simply disable MU access to their servers.