161–170 of 199 posts
Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.
At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…
That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in. Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other cust…
> I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. Many people have a similar experience, but it's amusing that statements like this can roughly indicate your age and the systems you were dealing with... Mine is 40 MB.
Not a week later I was back to figuring out what to delete to free up some space for a new game...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a few that have not, like his stance on rewrites. Apparently, if Joel's guru status had been properly respected, Netscape would be a powerhouse today, running on its Navigator codebase, because "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it." https://www.joelonsoftwar…
> Netscape would be a powerhouse today In our real timeline, Netscape did rewrite. During the rewrite their market share halved. And they died a few years later. So yeah, the lesson here is if you're okay to let your company just die and rebuild a new one, it's perfectly fine to rewrite the whole codebase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in. Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other cust…
The parent comment seems to imply that roughly 1/5 of their user base each used a different 1/5 of the product. This implies that every feature was genuinely valuable in driving revenue - or at least customer acquisition!
Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies
At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…
So it always appeared to be bloated with features nobody ever used, but actually somebody, somewhere, was using every one of the features. I doubt the number was actually 5% or that usage of features was close to even, but the principal idea seems reasonable. Different users use different subsets of a product.
I kinda miss the unix philosophy... one tool for one job. A PDF reader should read PDFs, there's no need for it to have its own (possibly paid) cloud service and an AI chat bot. I do get why some integrations are beneficial (eg. office software with text editing, spreadsheets and a database, so you can generate eg. letters with data from a database, etc... but every service needing its own cloud and adding a useless…
I think you have the wrong model for apps. Doing one thing is almost always having the full document CRUD loop. Once you have a pdf viewer users want rotating pages, then bookmarks, then highlights, then form filling, etc. That “just a pdf reader” is strictly worse than every pdf editor (which have to meet the minimum requirement of a pdf reader). Apple’s Automator and Preview combo for me are indispensible and perfe…
Or one that I've actually hacked into a few contexts already: What if every multi-line text field could be replaced by a neovim buffer?
Back in the days when desktop applications were the thing, I recall a (probably apocryphal) claim that nobody used more than 5% of Microsoft Office, but no two users used the same 5%. So it always appeared to be bloated with features nobody ever used, but actually somebody, somewhere, was using every one of the features. I doubt the number was actually 5% or that usage of features was close to even, but the principal…
“Without usage data, we can not guarantee that all features will remain in the software.”
At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…
I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.
Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them?
Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour schemes was just going to confuse users?
Would they think obscure jargon like 'vlookup' was too confusing, and difficult to localise internationally? Would they think formulas were too complicated to ever be a mass-market feature, as well as too difficult to input on mobile?
Would they discover 80% of office suite users don't use the spreadsheet beyond shopping lists, and replace it with a shopping list tool?
My theory is the modern software industry couldn't produce such a product. I don't think I've seen the industry produce a mass market product that requires a comparable level of user expertise in 20 years.