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...
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.