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All Hail Bloatware
Zarn writes "In Tuesday's Slate edition Andrew Shuman, in his
article The Love Bloat, argues that the problem with bloated software is that it isn't bloated enough and that we, the customers,
are the ones demanding bloat! " Heh. I'm wiping a tear off of my check from laughing so hard - Jonathan Swift, here we come.
Every program expands until it can read mail!
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
In salon.com Andrew Leonard has an article about it.
muLinux is probably the most versatile and interesting one-floppy-disk distribution of Linux out there. (Mr.) Michele Andreoli has written some incredible apps, such as an http server that's less than 1500 bytes in size. You can get X-windows on a second floppy, too. If you want it all (gcc compiler, ssh...), you'll have three floppies to deal with. I've been having lots of fun with this package...and very little bloat.
Check it out at www.sunsite.auc.dk/mulinux
Certified Microsoft Notworking Specialist
"Create [software] that even and idiot can use, and only an idiot will want to use it."
I don't know who came up with this quote, but it seems to fit. Seems that bloated software is mostly for people who don't "get" computers, but who *do* use them every day. This accounts for over 90% of the computer-using populous.
The downside is that the other 10% (or less) are nearly forced to use the bloatware also because the first 90% say "Here's that file I wanted you to look at, it's saved using Office 97." These are the same people who use MS Excel (or Word) to store record-and-field (read database) type info because they don't know what a database is or does.
I spend approximately 5-10% of my time writing scripts that do data conversion because someone decided to use "Bloatware" to do a particular job rather than the "correct" software. Why? Because "It's so easy to use!"
On the flip side, I *can't* use some of these products, because they're "too easy" to use. I still create HTML using a text editor. I'm the only one at my company (a multimedia company that produces web sites) who does this. Everyone else uses Frontpage, then wonders why the pages don't work right in Netscape. I will not use Word because it *insists* on correcting my "mistakes," and tries to anticipate what I want to do. If I put the letter 'c' in parentheses, it automatically converts it into a copyright symbol.
If I wanted a freekin copyright symbol, I would have used charmap.exe.
Enough soapboxing. =)
I don't buy that bloat is caused solely (or even *predominantly*) by user-requested (user-wanted as per market study) features.
For instance, who the heck asked for that damn paper clip and his moronic friends!!?? Who thought to themselves: "Damn it! I can't do a thing with this Office97...hey! I know! A dancing paper clip would really help me a lot!"
Also...Users don't buy upgrades JUST for new features. In fact, I'd argue users buy upgrades JUST so that they can stay current enough to work with everyone (and everything) else. Maybe if Microsoft didn't break its old file formats and introduce new ones every rev then people wouldn't upgrade as much. I got Word 6.1 for free with a new computer and have to date not installed a new one. I can't use documents from work though (and NO, it was not my choice to use MS Office...).
In the same vein, I think embedding HTML functionality into everything is stupid. I hate getting those bloat laden HTML messages from people in Pine, which I have to decipher for myself. Sometimes these messages include two attachments: one HTML attachment for bloated email readers, and one plain text attachment for normal ISO8859_1 readers. Over double the bandwandth of the simple plain text message. Most people don't even know this feature is on when they sprinkle bold, italic, and font tags all through there 1 line message and 6 line sig.
Bloat is also caused by laziness. I guess nobody at Microsoft ever thought "Hey, if we actually took the 3 extra months to get this really tight we might have a product consumers would buy and not feel like it was being stuffed down their throat." The lazy approach to complexity is to just scale up the same techniques and practices you were doing before. It's easy to copy your O(2^n) parser from Bloatv1.0 to Bloatv2.0 to use with files 10 times bigger. It's harder to redesign the whole architecture.
In any case, it seems to me the bloat coming out of MS is more due to two things: 1) Introducing useless technologies and additions to 2) Position themselves strategically for even more dominance,
than attempting to add things users *want*. Heck, I've *wanted* a smaller, tighter office suite for years...they haven't added *that* feature.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well, not always -- he does talk about the elegance of Windows [shudder] -- but his basic point is valid: people like to have features not necessarily to use them. IMHO bloat is caused by:
...
(1) One-program-does-it-all philosophy, which by, the way, is a valid design viewpoint. Emacs belongs to this school of thought, while Unix takes the opposite extreme (plenty of small interacting programs).
(2) Monolithic design, which is NOT a feature. MS Word has features targeted at lawyers (and useless for everybody else), at accountants, at writers, etc., etc. You don't need most of them, but get all of them anyway. Pluggable modules would have been a much cleaner solution (you are a lawyer? plug in the "Lawyer" module...)
(3) Feature competition between programs, which is driven by users: "What, your program cannot do a mail-merge to an index which includes animated GIFs and print out each third line?? It sucks, mine can do it!".
(4) The need for backward compatibilitly. This is less visible in application programs and more visible in system tools which often must be bug-for-bug compatible with everything going back ten years or more.
(5) The need to support all hardware under the sun. And the number of cool devices that you can plug into a computer grows and grows and grows and
(6) In the trade-off between a clean/tight code and speed of development, speed almost always wins. In the current business environment projects that are 50% over budget and on time are much much better than projects that are on budget but 50% late. Basically, the slogan is: "who cares whether it is optimized, if it works, ship it!" (in case of MS or games it is often "who cares if it works properly, ship it anyway!")
So I don't believe it is the malice of Microsoft or the incompetence of programmers that gives us bloated programs. Basically the definition of a bloat is "this program demands more resources than I expected it to". Having more resources available is a (not necessarily the) solution. Yes, Office 2000 needs ~200Mb of disk space to install. So what? I recently bought myself another hard drive -- it cost under $200 and is 10Gb in size. Do I care that much about allocating 2% of it to MS Office? Guess.
Bloat is bad in that it adds complexity which is the enemy. Insofar it consumes computer resources it is tolerable.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The author of this article has apparently fallen into the trap that so many other people have; namely, the mindset that the larger a piece of software is, the better it must be. I base this conclusion off of the fact that he seems to correlate bloat with "nifty features" such as voice recognition and "HTML mail."
Is this the bloat you know? Because it isn't the bloat that I know.
We're seeing a trend in software, and it's not a Microsoft-only trend (although one might argue that Microsoft is perhaps the best example.) When you see version 2.0 of a product that has double the system requirements (disk space, memory, processor speed, etc.) of version 1.0, it's pretty hard to explain away the bloat as being "nifty new features" if version 2.0 only provides a few new pieces of functionality. This author would have us believe that if the system requirements of a particular package double from one version to another, then that means that the functionality/usefulness of the new version is double that of its predecessor?
Does anybody really believe that?
For a period of about eight years, I used AppleWorks to do most of my home productivity work. For those of you that may be unfamiliar with it, it was basically an integrated applications suite that contained a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a rudimentary database. The integration was pretty nice; you could insert spreadsheets into your WP documents and the database had features like the always-useful mail merge. And it fit on one side of a 5-1/4" floppy disk, which was 144K.
Now, nobody in their right mind is going to argue that AppleWorks is more powerful than Office 2000. But let's use the author's estimate that a full install of Office requires 200M of disk space (this seems a bit low to me, but what the hell.) By the author's assumption, this means that Office 2000 has 1,422 times the functionality of AppleWorks. Whee! Viva la Office!
It doesn't matter, really; he's preaching to the pew. Microsoft has a large base of loyal customers who have demonstrated time and again that they're really not interested in issues like this. And quite frankly, maybe it's because most of their customers simply don't know enough to complain. (It's hard to suggest this without sounding like an elitist bastard, I know.) In reality, maybe it's pretty tough to blame Microsoft for consistently cranking out some of the most shameless bloatware around. After all, if their customers don't care, then why should they?
The bottom line is this: if you have to "up" the processor requirements and grow your executable size by 20% to accomodate a new, sophisticated rendering engine, then that's one thing. But if you throw in a flight simulator, 600K of unused bitmaps, and a mishmash of other junk and then start complaining about "deadlines", that's something completely different. If it makes me a "whiner" or a "malcontent" to complain about the latter, then I guess I'm proud to stand among the rank-and-file of whiners and malcontents.
Sorry, Redmond; one of the reasons I don't use your stuff is because I don't want to buy a new machine every year. And guess what! Thanks to Linux, I don't have to.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground