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?
We see right through this one, slashdot. You haven't added features in a decade or more, but that doesn't mean that this site is popular or relevant because of it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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)
A major service website (like the ones listed in TFS) is defined by its basic function. Facebook provides communications between users. Google is a search engine, Outlook is a mail program, YouTube shows videos. Once the major function of the website is defined and accepted, adding new features and functionality will be confusing and offputting to the users.
Applications, on the other hand, must support new types of data, new data locations (ie cloud services), different display and printing options and etc. In terms of continually updating applications is for some vendors (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) is a source of revenue.
When you talk about why are there lots of coders for websites versus few for Applications, I would point out that you aren't looking behind the scenes at a website - many coders are required to implement new technology to bring the services faster and more reliably to more users as well as keeping ahead of the bad guys.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Following every hype, adopting features fast and without clear goal, etc. is called "bad engineering", incidentally. The problem is that there are a lot of bad and really bad people at work on the web and on apps that I will refrain from calling "engineers" because they do not deserve that title. Hence doing it right for a change stands out. In other engineering disciplines it would not or at least not nearly as much.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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 market to basically every human. That means the 95% of humanity that isn't tech nerds. There are a few other software suites like this. Namely Office Suites. MS Office hasn't really had a big change since 2007 -and LOTS of people hated it when they did. Facebook, Google, etc. all have to cater to the bottom 90% of users. That bottom 90% doesn't like change very much, so features are added very slowly.
Most all the rest of the software on the planet is marketed to tech nerds -people that will actually PAY for software. To keep the money coming, the companies have to keep new features coming.
...the desktop software is the product, and thus needs to be upgraded for the revenue stream to keep up.
For all of the web sites cited, YOU'RE the product, and you can't be upgraded.
... are designed by idiots trying to increase ad space. Let's be honest. The new site redesign at reddit is much worse and less readable then old reddit. The reality is if reddit and other sites want more ad space they'd do well to create a completely seperate site from the main reddit site.
Most enhancements to the user interface are designed by total idiots. It's not that "innovation" is bad, it's that you need to think about the person using the website instead of business focus based bullshit. Many of the reasons people use social media like reddit or slashdot is because they got the user interface design mostly correct even if there is some cheap or bad design.
Instead of saying "how do we expand our audience or our reach to make more $$$" try to understand perhaps you need to find other avenues of making money besides selling ads or transforming a website from why any group of people found it interesting in the first place.
Don't fuck around with my user experience. If I see something I think would help, I'll ask for it. If I didn't go looking for a solution, there wasn't a problem.
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!
It's the business model.
A service website typically gets revenue (directly or typically indirectly) from use. Once it's working, popular, and supporting most potetial customers, the bux roll in. Why change what's working and risk breaking that? Essentially only bug fixing and reach-expanding could pay for itself.
An application typically gets its revenue from sales. Once it's sold, the user has it. No more money from him. Given time you saturate the market and your revenue peters out - while your support load continues.
This can be fixed partly by making the app run on other platforms and expanding the target market. But for ongoing revenue you need previous customers to buy again. They won't do this unless you provide a later-and-greater version with enough extra functionality to be worth it. Then they're in the business of adding bells and whistles until the old customers become repeat customers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Desktop applications only have to worry about one user, Websites have to worry about all of them. As a result, in the early life of a website (with few users), it's relatively easy to have engineering focus on features, as most available web tech these days can handle that. As your user base grows, however, you start running into scale issues where features you've previously built don't hold up so well. Suddenly, you're putting a good chunk of your engineering effort into updating your existing features for the new # of users required. At the same time, the effort of adding a new feature becomes harder, because you can't just create a new one like before - you have to engineer it to perform at the scale of your current (and future) system, with all the yak-shaving of technical debt which may be involved.
In short: As things get bigger, they get harder.
This signature can save you $400 on your car insurance!
I guess you weren't here for the last redesign.
After 3 years of beta testing and consistently being panned by users, the new owners tried to force it onto users, it went so bad that users staged a boycott to get it rolled back.
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. . . .
Large web apps are often at near saturation. If someone hasn't signed up for facebook or gmail already then it's very unlikely that any kind of redesign or feature addition will change that calculus for them. However it does risk alienating existing users and in turn reducing the revenue stream.
Contrast that with non-subscription desktop software, you make nothing off satisfied users, you instead only make money off people who want the latest version and that forces a certain level of innovation. There's also little chance of pissing off your satisfied users, since they can usually skip the upgrade if the software is currently meeting their needs.
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..
Split your examples into major services, and small specific services, then compare them to desktop software. I mean properly!
Facebook? Features get added, removed subtle UI changes etc on a monthly basis. Google does so on an event driven basis (Have you been watching the world cup ticker updating live in your google results?) Did you notice the change to maps voice navigation that rolled out last month in how it announces locations? Did you see the added feature that asks you to confirm traffic accidents?
Of course not. You're not paying attention.
Likewise how many value added features were constantly changing on ICQ? What has changed in Skype other than the number of adverts that are shown? Yeah they move the buttons around but features? At the start of this year they added the ability to on the fly switch between multiple cameras. Back in 2015 they added group chat.
If you have small apps, websites, or special purpose programs you don't need new features regardless of the platform.
If you have large software or web apps you will get new features regardless of the platform.
Pay attention.
I work for Google Search. We launch multiple new features daily. Thing is, you don't necessarily see them all.
Some changes affect ranking; improving the algorithm, bringing you even better results, coping with misbehaving websites, and more. You won't see any UI changes here, but the search results get better. This could affect all of search (rare, but happens), or queries of a specific domain (e.g., queries about music), or a specific subset of results (e.g., sites that don't use https).
Some changes affect performance. A change that shaves a dozen milliseconds off the result page's load-time isn't something you'll notice, but in aggregate, these make Google Search better. Again, some of these optimizations apply to all searches, some to subclasses of searches, or to some devices only.
Some changes make our direct answers better. You're probably familiar with Google's calculator, for example; how many people would note if it suddenly starts answering queries involving a few more units, or different ways of asking about math? Google also provides answers about sports, weather, stock quotes, movie showtimes, and more. A new feature could involve better weather predictions, or supporting new leagues worldwide, or having fresher results. (If you're following the soccer World Cup, try searching for that on Google.)
Some changes involve only specific languages, or specific platforms (only desktop, or only mobile, or only iOS, ...). Some changes are experimental, and are removed after a while if they don't prove popular with users, or ephemeral, and are removed after a while because they're no longer relevant.
In short... to say that Google rolls out few and far between updates is somewhat inaccurate, and I'm sure the same is true for all the other websites you mention in your question.
[I work for Google but this response represents only my personal opinion and is not official in any way or manner.]
- Tal Cohen