Software bloat
16/07/08 20:59 Filed in: Software
You may have noticed a bit of a theme with some of my
recient posts, that of software bloat.
So what do I mean by software bloat.
Well simply the constant adding of new features to each successive release of a bit of software. This could be seen as a good thing in a ‘young’ bit of software, but it is almost always not a good thing. This the reason why Word, a simple word processor has grown in to the huge monster it is today.
So why does it happen?
Three reasons. Firstly from a developers point of view it’s much more fun to add a new feature than debug an existing one. I know this to be true, since I’ve been in that possition. A new feature is going to invlove you working with your own code much more than debuging, which is more than likley going to invlove digging through 1000’s of lines of code written by lots of other people (including your self, 6 months ago), which is no where near as much fun.
The second reason is that users like me, like to get new features to fidle with, even if that feature is not likely to be one we use. New features are like new toys so they are always fun to play with...for a while.
Finally, since software development is expensive, new features give the marking people a reason to justify the cost of the next upgrade! This reason, I think more than any other is the reason for the new interface in Office 2007. Most of the applications in the suite already have more features than any one person needs in a life time, so they had to find a way to make the cost of the upgrade to 2007 worth it, so they changed the interface completley. This may have been the right deciesion, but for the wrong reason, becasue I do think that the new interface has some good points, you probably have less clicks to get to a lot of the features, but if they didn’t have so may features they wouldn’t have needed to change the interface. So we have an update which was needed because of the past updates. Updates are now feeding off each other!
Any way back to my point.
New features are useful in young products, but as an application matures it should need less and less in the way of new features.
Look at my comments here on the latest update to RapidWeaver. I said it was disapointing that there was very little new in this version. But then I got think, well what else do I want to it do and I couldn’t really think of anything major that I wanted it to be able to do. Of course there will always be little things that could be tweaked, but doing this might make me very happy but upset a whole load of other users. You will never be able to please everyone!
Of course what has happened is that the file format was changed to make it more easily searchable with spotlight and to make plugin’s easier to write and more powerfull (notice this is another case of an update being ready to feed a future update!)
I still use RapidWeaver on this and other sites that I’m working on right now and it’s still the best tool for this sort of job, dispite my comments about the new verison.
Also take examples of software I use most days, like Omni outliner and Scrivener. Both have been quite a while since the there last updates but are they less usful as a result? No. In both cases they have all of the features I need day to day and so they don’t need updates. With Omnioutliner this is beause it is a mature app, having been around for years. Scrivener is less mature, but it’s a testament to the orginal idea that it had nearly everything a writer needs right from the start.
Also in my post on the last Steve Jobs keynote and Snow Leopard, I said it could be hard sell for Snow Leopard with it having very little in the way of new features (for home users anyway, the Exchange intergation is going to be huge for bisnesses), but why should that be the case. If this new version runs faster and more stably, isn’t this alone worth paying for (not that I had any problems with speed and very few with stablity under Leopard)?
It should be.
So speaking as one of the sorts of people that used to drive software bloat, I’m now doing my best, not to be tempted to go every paid upgrade to my huge collection of software. I’m going to try and stop fuling this sort of bloat.
Well simply the constant adding of new features to each successive release of a bit of software. This could be seen as a good thing in a ‘young’ bit of software, but it is almost always not a good thing. This the reason why Word, a simple word processor has grown in to the huge monster it is today.
So why does it happen?
Three reasons. Firstly from a developers point of view it’s much more fun to add a new feature than debug an existing one. I know this to be true, since I’ve been in that possition. A new feature is going to invlove you working with your own code much more than debuging, which is more than likley going to invlove digging through 1000’s of lines of code written by lots of other people (including your self, 6 months ago), which is no where near as much fun.
The second reason is that users like me, like to get new features to fidle with, even if that feature is not likely to be one we use. New features are like new toys so they are always fun to play with...for a while.
Finally, since software development is expensive, new features give the marking people a reason to justify the cost of the next upgrade! This reason, I think more than any other is the reason for the new interface in Office 2007. Most of the applications in the suite already have more features than any one person needs in a life time, so they had to find a way to make the cost of the upgrade to 2007 worth it, so they changed the interface completley. This may have been the right deciesion, but for the wrong reason, becasue I do think that the new interface has some good points, you probably have less clicks to get to a lot of the features, but if they didn’t have so may features they wouldn’t have needed to change the interface. So we have an update which was needed because of the past updates. Updates are now feeding off each other!
Any way back to my point.
New features are useful in young products, but as an application matures it should need less and less in the way of new features.
Look at my comments here on the latest update to RapidWeaver. I said it was disapointing that there was very little new in this version. But then I got think, well what else do I want to it do and I couldn’t really think of anything major that I wanted it to be able to do. Of course there will always be little things that could be tweaked, but doing this might make me very happy but upset a whole load of other users. You will never be able to please everyone!
Of course what has happened is that the file format was changed to make it more easily searchable with spotlight and to make plugin’s easier to write and more powerfull (notice this is another case of an update being ready to feed a future update!)
I still use RapidWeaver on this and other sites that I’m working on right now and it’s still the best tool for this sort of job, dispite my comments about the new verison.
Also take examples of software I use most days, like Omni outliner and Scrivener. Both have been quite a while since the there last updates but are they less usful as a result? No. In both cases they have all of the features I need day to day and so they don’t need updates. With Omnioutliner this is beause it is a mature app, having been around for years. Scrivener is less mature, but it’s a testament to the orginal idea that it had nearly everything a writer needs right from the start.
Also in my post on the last Steve Jobs keynote and Snow Leopard, I said it could be hard sell for Snow Leopard with it having very little in the way of new features (for home users anyway, the Exchange intergation is going to be huge for bisnesses), but why should that be the case. If this new version runs faster and more stably, isn’t this alone worth paying for (not that I had any problems with speed and very few with stablity under Leopard)?
It should be.
So speaking as one of the sorts of people that used to drive software bloat, I’m now doing my best, not to be tempted to go every paid upgrade to my huge collection of software. I’m going to try and stop fuling this sort of bloat.
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