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.
...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.
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.
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
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..
https://soylentnews.org/ an interesting fork of the old slashcode with some weird users.
Interesting changes include Unicode support, more ways to moderate including the disagree and touche mods that don't affect the score or karma. Being able to mod in discussions that you've commented in, with some exceptions, so you can mod someone and then tell them why and I'm sure some other interesting changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism