Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl v4 would be another good example.
Ubuntu 10.04
Windows 2000
The more features you add
21–30 of 35 posts
Re: The more features you add
#22i've come to believe Fopt and F2 are only different numbers when you're underinvested in design, or that you have positioned your incentive structure in opposition to HCI first principles
Re: The more features you add
#23Joel Spolsky wrote years ago that nothing generated new sales of his software more than releasing a new version with more features. That's hard for a business to turn down.
Joel Spolsky was in the business of selling versions of his software. A lot of businesses nowadays are selling subscriptions to saas software, and the sales dynamic is very different.
> the sales dynamic is very different
For enterprise SaaS, QBRs and contract renewals are the point where sales shares all the new features as part of the story as to why the company should continue being a customer.
Re: The more features you add
#24> And an increasing number of features inevitably begin to bog down what a company can do going forward
This is a common misconception.
It may happen to be true, but it does not have to be true.
What prevents rapid delivery is constraints, and naive, stupid or incompetent implementation (or requirements) for features that add more constraints.
Adding features in a way that aligns with existing constraints, or breaks existing constraints doesn’t have to be slow; just careful.
What kills software is “nothing can ever change once it’s in production”; ie. once a feature is live, it becomes a hard constraint that can never be altered or removed or changed because of user expectations.
It’s not the number of features; it’s the immobility and panic caused by the prospect of anything ever changing, which prevents you changing anything, except very very slowly.
Re: The more features you add
#25I think "optimal number of features" is too simplified.
Many features don't require any user interaction or even knowledge, like passive error checks, and are easy to implement.
Some features can replace other features or even other entire systems, which would otherwise be much more work without the integration.
If I'm selling something on eBay, they do everything from communications to returns to payments to shipping calculations to keeping track of what I've bought and sold.
I sure wouldn't want to use some kind of modular thing where those were all separate parts.
Minimum effort spent on stuff nobody wants to do, minimum chance of mistakes, and minimum chance for getting into a state where you have to go back and redo earlier work is a more direct measure than just trying to avoid complexity.
That last one seems to be one of the usual very common points that make systems harder to use for people who aren't used to how software in general works, because it requires making the user define things as small pieces that the computer stacks up for you, rather than the real world process of stacking up stuff you wouldn't even think of as separate steps.
Re: The more features you add
#26Relatedly, and more important for startup founders, is that more features may not actually drive increased adoption (e.g. David Bland's product death cycle https://andrewchen.com/this-is-the-product-death-cycle-why-i...).
Re: The more features you add
#27"... the more features you have to support"
This is my issue right now. The maintenance overhead is an increasing percentage of my work week.
Re: The more features you add
#28It's true that any app that lives long enough reaches an "optimum" version and then goes downhill from there. For Microsoft Word, for instance, the optimum, or "Elvis" version was "v5.1 for Mac".
I also believe (and some others) that this optimum version is usually very very early in the life cycle. Around the first stable release.
Re: The more features you add
#29"... the more features you have to support"
This is my issue right now. The maintenance overhead is an increasing percentage of my work week.
I read something called "learn to say no" on HN a while ago, trying to find the same one again might be tough but that was the gist of it: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=learn+to+say+no
Re: The more features you add
#30It's true that any app that lives long enough reaches an "optimum" version and then goes downhill from there. For Microsoft Word, for instance, the optimum, or "Elvis" version was "v5.1 for Mac".
I wonder if it is related to when the most competent team — often the one that created the product — leaves and is replaced by other people that can't maintain the same level of quality.