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?

Comments

Good one, there!

[damn_registrars]

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.

Ain't broke.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fuck with it.

whole bunch of people need to learn that...

Three possible Reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

It is called "good engineering"

[gweihir]

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.

Because there's no need for it?

[TigerPlish]

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.

Re:Because there's no need for it?

[tlhIngan]

To Wit: /. Beta. Did not want, do not want, what is now is fine... just fix the goddamned unicode problem.

There is no Unicode problem. /. supports Unicode just fine.

There's a Unicode troll problem though, which is why /. has a rather strict whitelist of allowed characters. The trolls were constantly abusing the Unicode control codepoints and adornment codepoints to screw up the page and turn it all black, reverse text, etc.

The back end supports Unicode completely and has for nearly 2 decades now. Unfortunately, nearly 2 decades ago, the admins were having to delete comments (or mod them down) continuously that abused Unicode and turned the site useless.

You'll find it on any new website with brand new shiny comments section impacted by this and they rapidly either shut down comments or filters as well. Unicode is not easy and there are many issues with it, see all the iPhones and Androids crashing or doing other things when sent some strange Unicode text.

Re:Because there's no need for it?

[Kjella]

Oh please... slashdot hasn't made any effort to even try being user friendly. For example in Norwegian we have: æÃÃ¥

Didn't parse correctly? Here it is with HTML entities:
æ = æ
ø = ø
å = å

What about a simple thing as micrometers:
µ = nope

A simple formula with like delta, epsilon or sigma?
δ = nope
ε = nope
σ = nope

Nobody has made the least bit of effort to whitelist basic scientific characters. Or tried to make characters that actually are whitelisted work through normal input. I have worked with Unicode, if you want an "open" interpretation it's pretty hard. If you just want a "closed" interpretation of basic character sets (what 99.99% need) it's pretty damn easy.

It's simple....

[Rick Zeman]

...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.