The Feature Conundrum

What do goverments and software development have in common? It's a hell of a lot easier to bloat than it is streamline - there's a lot less resistance adding something in than taking it away.

In the case of government, any tax or program, once instituted will only die after the deafening scream of special interests and heart wrenching testimonial articles from the local newspaper explaining how their removal is destroying some community, family, or small orphan child. [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ]

In the case of Software, trying to remove a little-used feature from a later version of a piece of software is a sure invitation that there's a least one user out there for whom that feature is absolutely indispensable.

I'm a big believer in the "the best code is no code" mantra. The code that you don't write is code that you don't have to worry about maintaining, and maintenance costs - as has been beaten into developers in every programming class ever taught - will end up far exceeding the cost of writing the code initially.

Despite the danger of playing the feature game, almost every piece of commercial software does it. If this doesn't ring true to you, I cite as an example every piece of Anti-virus software I've used in the past 15 years.

The Anti-virus industry is very much a 'feature comparison' business - any feature that appeared in one of piece of software would quickly need to be copied by it's competitors so that a vendors software would hold up in the feature-by-feature comparison charts on the back of every box. Real-time scanning, check. Email scanner, check. Poorly implemented firewall, check. Auto-updater that triggers whenever you're in the middle of delivering a presentation, check.

In each case after being happy with one vendor's software I eventually ended up switching as each vendor (first McAfee, then Norton, then AVG) bloated it's product to the point where they brought my windows machine to a crawl - I often ended up just turning anti-virus protection off when trying to actually get any work done.

Software bloat is a major issue and it's one of the major reasons that there are still opportunities for lightly-featured players to come into crowded software niches (See: Basecamp ) and steal significant market share. If you can fulfill the needs of 95% of your market base by being better at a core set of features, leave that overly demanding 5% to your bloated legacy competitor.

Quality not quantity - users these days are doing less back-of-the-box shopping and instead relying on word-of-internet to tell them what to buy. Us software developers need to follow suit, and focus on creating better experiences for the 95%. Now, what to do about government spending and the Boston Globe's expansive human-interest-story department I have no idea.