In the software industry, the release of newer, better versions is part of the natural order. It's a relentless march towards perfection that started with the first personal computers, and continues today. We expect software to get larger and more sophisticated over time, to track with the hardware improvements that Moore's law has provided us for so many years. Rapid evolution is a good thing, and it's one reason the computer industry is so exciting to work in. If you don't like the way things are today, just wait five years; everything will be different.
I think this is why new web-based alternatives to traditional applications are becoming so popular. They just donāt have the bloat that native apps do and they only have the features that users need. Things like Basecamp and Google Apps have only a small percentage of the features of Microsoft Project and Office, yet they are getting more and more users that are tired of the bloat and lack of collaborative abilities.
It feels like current native software applications, like many other things, follow the Pareto Principle where 80% of the users use 20% of the features. So all of these upstart web companies are just focusing on that 20% and doing it well. It makes me wonder why native applications arenāt following the trend as well and cutting out the bloat.
A lot of this resonates with the book āGetting Realā by 37 signals [http://gettingreal.37signals.com/] who are the guys behind Basecamp. In chapter 2 they advise āunderdoing your competitionā and ābuilding lessā because it will differentiate you from your competitors. And I particularly like the āBuild Opinionated Softwareā paradigm which basically states āYou canāt be everything to everyone so be be something for someoneā.
If you havenāt read the book I can highly reccomend it. And itās free to read online too.
With Paint Shop Pro, I tried out version 7, but it started taking ages to load, so I simply didnāt upgrade.
What really bugs me is when applications force you to upgrade, or it stops working. Instant messaging clients are the worst for this. I really liked the MSN Messenger 6.1 client, it was fairly small, didnāt have any of the annoying animated emoticons, completely unnecessary "Personal Messageā field that people just fill up with even more junk, no adverts shoved where-ever they could make room (Just one MSN logo on the contact list, if I recall right).
Anyway, the client was working fine, until one day it started giving a āUpgrade to the latest version now!ā message, which there seemed to be no way to disable, you could stop it appearing every 30minutes while the client was running by altering the registery, btu when you restarted it, it was backā¦
I had to reinstall for some reason (Tried the newer client, possibly), so I had to find the 6.1 installer - I looked everywhere, but couldnāt find the installer for the working v6.1 (They all refused to start, claiming there was a newer version available)
Eventually, a Dutch friend sent the installer he had, which worked, but was in Dutch. I used that for quite a while.
If they changed the MSN protocol, and the old client wouldnāt work - fine! Itād be silly to update the old clients, just for the few people that use it. But, the old clients worked fine, the only thing that ābrokeā it was the upgrade-checkingā¦
I use a laptop as a main client now, so Iāve taken to using irssi/Bitlbee on a friends shell-server. No forced upgrades, no random changes/āimprovementsā which exponetionally increasing file sizesā¦
I can think of few.
Total Commander - itās beendeveloped for over a decade, yet itās still full of usefull features, fast and compact. I canāt think of any feature in it thatās utterly useless.
7-zip - fast small and open source. And has better compression ratio than WinZip.
Sub-Edit Player - itās a matter of personal preference but I love this small movie player.
Fast Stone Image Viewer - I find it to be perfect replacement for ACDSee from itās golden age (v3.x). Unfortunatelly Iām afraid that it might take the wrong path, that mentioned program once took.
Winamp is an interesting case among those ābloatedā applications:
Even though it now stands at version 5.5 with loads of extra features and things you and I wonāt usually need, you can always revert back to the fast and classic 2.95 version that you love simply by selecting the Winamp Classic skin from the Skins menu.
I think the Winamp folks did a fabulous job of keeping all those extra features not part of the base Winamp core by packing them into what they call āmodern skinsā. This way, they kept old-time fans like me attached while still trying to match iTunes and other modern players feature-by-feature, and then some.
Iām still using PaintShop Pro 4.12 for everday usage.
For heavier tasks Photoshop is the way to go.
The only app not spoiling over the years is google - but just a few weeks before, the search-result-page is āenrichedā with youtube-findings an sometimes some pictures - the start of the end?
Thatās exactly it. Features sell software. Itās busywork to justify ānewā versions, because the word ānewā is one of the most powerful words in marketing. Every really successful package jumps the shark sooner or later. The lucky times are when you see it coming and you hold onto an earlier version. I did that with Photoshop.
I had a Mac, switched to PC, and switched back to Mac. On my Mac, I think I was running Photoshop 3 for about 5 years. Then I switched to PC around 2000, and had to get Photoshop 6 or 7 - the earliest version I could find. I stayed on that until I switched back to Mac, this year. I bought Photoshop Elements and Iāve honestly never been so insulted in my life.
I think the software as a service model will probably reduce the effects of this problem, since businesses will no longer be dependent on new releases to make money.
i like sumatra pdf for pdf files ā under 900kb, smaller than most PDFs themselves! As an added bonus it doesnāt try to merge itself with your browser. I recall using FoxIt previously and having render issues ā Iām sure theyāve been since fixed, but I never gave it another chance.
Sadly, productivity software isnāt the only perpetrator of this. Case in point: drivers for my HP scanner. It also insist on installing some āshare on the webā bullshit that you canāt remove, and the installation process takes 5-10 minutes. All those megabytes are supposedly for āexample materialā. If they only offered a no-frills option - Iāll use the default Photoshop interface to scan, thank you.
In theory Firefoxās extension system was supposed to keep out the bloat. Yet, with every version they keep adding āessentialā features to the core codebase. If they were so important, wouldnāt it be better to put that effort into building the features into extensions?
As far as bloated programming frameworks goes, thatās a tough one. I personally use a huge number of the features in every version of .NET, things which I would rather not have to implement myself.
It would seem that ābloatā is all a matter of perspective.
I think the key for a successful long lived software project is a coherent vision, and a team that consistently push toward that vision.
the main problem is that in the software industry, people come and go very often, and software starts to be pulled into new directions as new inconsistent ideas are thrown into it.
evolution works well only if you donāt play with the fitness function, but with projects that changes direction all the time, the fitness function keep changing.
As OpenOffice has become more bloated and slow to start (though, in all honestly, they are trying to optimize), I started looking for alternatives. KOffice didnāt cut it for me (itās much less flexible than it seems). My sollution? Go back to OpenOffice 1.1.5. It runs even on Windows98 (with a 300MHz processor, hint, hint). The only feature Iām missing is ODF support, but there are freely available converters. Theyāve even backported PDF export, which I consider a must-have. Pure bliss!
i guess the most popular bad example for bloating these days is facebook.
it seems to be using the mode firefox uses; expansion through applicationsā¦ but innocent users still get tons of invitations daily. worst of all, most of the applications are designed in a way to trick users to sending invitations.
