Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Do Popular Websites Add New Features So Sparingly?
dryriver writes: If you are a user of a popular professional desktop software program, it is not uncommon for that program to get anywhere from 5 to 20 major or minor new features and functions about once a year to stay desirable and competitive. But it seems that hugely popular internet-based sites and services like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp, Telegram and others get major new features/changes much, much slower than desktop software. Quite often you'll come across a barrage of breathless news articles that say "Popular Internet Service X will add Y feature starting from April 1st." It is often one single and very obvious feature or functionality being added that people have wanted for years, not a cluster of 5 or 10 funky new functions at the same time.
Why is this the case? How is it that desktop software with just a few hundred thousand users and no more than a few dozen coders working can add 5 to 20 major new functions in just one year, and do this year after year, but a major internet-based service with tens or hundreds of millions of users and presumably hundreds or thousands of techies working behind the curtain keeps everyone waiting three years or longer to build a much requested feature into the system, and then only rolls out that one desired feature to great fanfare as if it is a huge achievement? Is it really that much harder to code major new features into an internet/cloud service, versus coding major new features into desktop software; or is this a deliberate business model that has become popular?
Why is this the case? How is it that desktop software with just a few hundred thousand users and no more than a few dozen coders working can add 5 to 20 major new functions in just one year, and do this year after year, but a major internet-based service with tens or hundreds of millions of users and presumably hundreds or thousands of techies working behind the curtain keeps everyone waiting three years or longer to build a much requested feature into the system, and then only rolls out that one desired feature to great fanfare as if it is a huge achievement? Is it really that much harder to code major new features into an internet/cloud service, versus coding major new features into desktop software; or is this a deliberate business model that has become popular?
Don't fuck with it.
whole bunch of people need to learn that...
By the time a web developer has learned the latest JavaScript framework, a new framework has already came out and the old framework is being depreciated.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
1. The software is mature, and any "new features" are just Gold Plating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_plating_(software_engineering) (See MS Office suite).
2. The software is NOT mature, but any new features become an arguing match between Developers, Marketing, Upper Management, etc, so thus only minimal changes are ever made. (See Facebook)
3. The software is old, krusty, and incredibly hard to maintain. Adding anything new that would truly be useful is a gargantuan task in painful software archeology. (See Slashdot)
To Wit: /. Beta. Did not want, do not want, what is now is fine... just fix the goddamned unicode problem.
Seriously. The quest for the New Shiny more often than not just ruins things. Like round picture frames in contact lists, etc. Who wants that?! Square was just fine. And flat UI designs.. they universally look like something a preschooler did with safety scissors, brightly-colored construction paper and paste.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Websites don't push out new features? They do all the time. What they don't do is announce them- they tend to just roll them out. So you get a constant barrage of small updates. Facebook in particular- I worked there. It gets new features daily. To the point where the people working there don't even know what's going out- whenever discussion of making a "what's new" type announcement was brought up, they basically decided it was impossible to keep track. If anything your description is precisely backwards.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Hey, let's take something that works and mangle it till it is useless!
For software, the income comes from the people who pay to get the software. No new features means no sales, since no new features means there's no need to upgrade to a new version.
For Facebook/etc, the income comes from the ads pushed to the users. Too many new features at once and too much difference between versions and your risk loser your precious users.
Next question?
#DeleteFacebook
The bigger you are, the more it costs. If you're a popular service, you're likely running many, many servers doing many, many things across a broad geographic area. You've carefully implemented your infrastructure to balance cost, stability, reliability, and performance. Adding just one new feature can completely upend this calculus. If you're running multiple server farms in multiple data centers, this gets expensive quickly.
You can't afford "aw shucks oopsie woos". Whoops! Your new feature caused some unexpected behavior for 15% of all users, resulting in 18 hours of downtime! If you're a small web operation, you're sending out a lighthearted email apologizing for the inconvenience and promising to do better. Maybe you're even offering a week's worth of free service. If you're a major player, you're in the world news. Your enterprise customers are screaming at you--or worse, they're not screaming at you and are looking for your replacement. You're working on figuring out just how much this will impact the bottom line, because if you're going to need to cut back somewhere, you want to know that as early as possible. Mess up hard enough, and you're looking at a subpoena from your governmental bodies of choice.
You can't afford to annoy your users. Ooooh, we've all had that time when we rolled out an awesome new feature and the user response ranged from "meh" to "change it back right now you gibbering twits." That's never fun, is it? Gotta roll back to yesterday's configuration, apologize, and try to figure out how to move forward. If you're a major player, "rolling back" may be nigh impossible, and if you've already reconfigured your infrastructure to accommodate your new feature, that's money already spent (and worse, your new configuration may even be sub-optimal in the absence of said new feature.) You're basically looking at the same outcome as the previous point, perhaps minus the subpoenas and plus a bit more global mockery on social media.
Messing up will cost you users, and those users are unlikely to return. If you're small, this can be weathered, and is almost expected. There are way more fish in the sea, and you if can iron things out, you've still got plenty of room to grow. If you're big, everyone already knows about you and what you do. You've got a lot smaller pool of "new" people to bring on compared to the people you've already reached. Big companies that mess up need to work to retain unhappy customers, because there aren't that many fish in the sea who haven't already heard of them.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Why Do Popular Websites Add New Features So Sparingly?
If it ain't broke, don't break it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
New features aren't always good. They tend to encourage bloat-ware. I remember when Nero BurningROM was the best burner software out there (IMHO).
They kept adding more and more features and more and more bloat. A 10MB download (for the installer) turned into a 20MB, which then turned into a 50MB download, which (last I checked) had topped out around 117MB...
For a fucking burner?!?
I stopped using NERO a long time ago... It became JUNK.
I wish, sometimes, that Windows apps had the UNIX philosophy of "Do 1 thing and do it well". But, you can't sell the exact same app to a person twice if nothing has changed, so I understand WHY it happens, but it eventually kills most payware..