Jeff, when and why did you dump Microsoft Money?
I’m using the '05 version, without the online functionality, and I’m fairly pleased with it. But it was my first foray into personal finance software, so I probably don’t know what I’m missing.
On a related note, regarding extensions in Firefox… I’d say there’s a small drawback in that unless people are “power users” who know to look, and where to look, for extensions, they’ll never know what features or ease of use they’re missing out on.
ARE NEW VERSIONS WORTH IT?
Never underestimate the power of a “CUSTOM” install with liberal use of unchecking. Most new software can be trimmed and tweaked to their original greatness. (e.g. Nero, Winamp, ACDSee).
SOFTWARE SPOIL
Here’s another disturbing trend: Every new version of most major third party software wants to install yahoo/google’s toolbar/desktop by default. Is Google/Yahoo just going around to every 3rd party software developer on the planet and paying them money to include their take-over-your-system bundleware? This isn’t software spoilage, this is software DISEASE!
Winamp 2.9x
To all you winamp 2.9x users out there: Hark! (I could be wrong but) I believe I can botnet your computer just by getting you to play an exploitative music file.
@dbr
Instant messaging clients are the worst for this. I really liked the MSN Messenger 6.1 client
After MS terrorized me into switching to “Live” 8.1 from 7.5 I removed the MSN Messenger completely. Wait, you can’t remove it completely because there’s another incarnation of the messenger in the program directory - old good 4.7! It’s just 2 MB in 11 files and it has voice conersation too! So I use it when I need to talk. For all the rest IM’ing there’s Miranda. BTW Miranda is a good example of software extended with plug-ins - it has a quite small core and tons of plugins.
Another good exmple of not bloated software is IrfanView. I use it for many years and it’s still neat and slim even in the last version 4.10. Most of the extensions are made as plug-ins. (And yes, it can send email too, but you need Email.dll to do it.)
@Krzysztof Ko#378;mic
7-zip - fast small and open source.
It’s still very young. We’ll take a look at it in five years. Meanwile it’s exactly a “do one thing and do it well” program. And it works perfecty with TotalCommander.
Yes, yes, yes. Wonderful article! I’ll never stop saying this: the future of software is specialized apps. I’m a professional editor/writer, and I can tell you that the best commercial software for word-churners was WordStar. WORD-processing (as opposed to DOCUMENT-processing) software has gone steadily downhill ever since. With the very notable exception of WordPerfect for DOS; though even WPDos lost some of WordStar’s word-twiddling power.
I can envision a new WORD-processing program finding a huge audience. Not everyone writes for living, but countless people write as part of their living - and they’d be immensely attracted to a compact tool that did it efficiently. Without crashing 5-6 times a day (MS Word).
Microsoft has worked hard to eliminate the learning curve for office workers. Professional writers WANT the learning curve. It’s the price of control - as any Vim user knows - and control is eminently worth it. Give me a word processing rig that can do what WordStar, WordPerfect, and Vim could/can, plus OneNote-style content handling and search, and I’ll pay $100 for it in a heartbeat - and I’ll spread the word to thousands of writers in the appropriate forums. Big software just plain sucks, with few exceptions: Dreamweaver/Expression, Photoshop, Indesign. But those are highly focused, professional tools, created by people who’re aware that professionals won’t settle for shoddy performance.
I’ve gotten to a point where the upgrade is evaluated like a new product plus the cost of learning where the upgrade put the old feature. It was skip a version, but now it could be skip 4 versions or never upgrade. Good enough is better than a new learning curve of wading through useless crap.
Loved PSP 5 for years. No need to upgrade. Paint.NET replaced it because the setup wanted my license number every time I installed.
Tried to play an mp3 the other day on a new computer and WiMP wanted to go through the a 5-10 minute questionnaire setup. I just want to play the song I double clicked. Little feature bloat there.
We still use Installshield 7 and 10.5 at work, because upgrades cost money. There’s no need. The new version does do anything worth the price of replacement.
How has nobody mentioned Trillian?! Trillin is quite possibly the most bloated and over-featured resource hog I have ever had the displeasure of working with. It only gets worse with their new Astra version that’s planned. WTF? MORE features? . . you have to be kidding me . . .
(please pardon my spelling errors above)
Opera has continued to focus on their core features for about a decade. My Opera UI is exactly the same today as it was when I first started using it (I paid to remove the ads back then).
While they have added a lot of bloatware type features, I don’t see them, they don’t clutter my view, they don’t SLOW down the app, and I can just ignore them. I know there are thousands of users who use all that crap though. So they seem to have captured the “best of both worlds” goal.
Other apps I use on a daily basis that have remained simple:
I don’t use media players because my computer is not a stero system. My iPod replaced my stereo.
All office apps are full of terrible bloat, OpenOffice included.
I’ve thought about this from time to time, and sometimes I wonder if the developers even realize it’s happening. If you know whats going into the software, you can understand why it’s taking a second longer to start up or where it’s using all that memory, but for the user who just opens up AIM to send his friends a message, it just simply takes longer.
Interestingly enough, I think this is what also seems to be leading to these “Full Rewrites” of programs we’ve used for years, such as AIM.
Speaking of which, Lite AIM is a client developed by somone over at AOL. It’s worth checking out.
http://x.aim.com/laim
That’s why I love services that are totally web-based: they can’t really be bloated. The only thing that can be bloated is the browser / PC themselves.
Paint Shop Pro 6.0 is 7.25mb
It’s the highest version I will use, has everything I’d need to output web apps/icons or forms.
As the developer of a program that gets updated every 2 years for the income spike, I dread hearing “what new features are you adding to the new version?”. This has been going on since '95 so I’ve managed not to kill the golden goose…yet. What the program really needs is a rewrite but that doesn’t look good in the bullet points or the bottom line.
The other source of new features are the customers themselves. A day doesn’t go by without hearing one of the following lines “This program would be perfect if you only added…” or “The ??? diagram is the industry standard” or “You really need to import/export the ??? data format”.
.Net doesn’t really qualify (yet) as spoiled, but I could certainly nominate Visual Studio to that category.
Emacs
'nuff said.
Michael G.R You want a lean image viewer?
Try irfanview. Great little program. Views images quite reliably, and provides you with options to do basic manipulations, batch file processing (convert to different format, resize, etc), and various other things. But VERY small and quite portable. Just don’t let it take over your video preferances.
Anybody has some good alternatives to ACDsee?
I’m looking for a fast modern image viewer. Open source or freeware even better, but will take a look at commercial software too.
Thanks!
I agree with some comments above that electronics are suffering from this as well. Every phone seems to want to be a camera, a media player, a phone, and an advertising platform. What it results in are messy UIs that are slow and cameras with too many things to break on them. I’m reminded of your microwave post a while ago.
Otherwise I tend to lean to systems that allow you to take out the bloat, like Linux or Firefox. A nice thing about package or extension based systems is that you can pull out the bloat if you want to. Maybe I don’t want a fancy graphical configurator for something, so I can just remove it. I think this is one of the largest strengths of Linux as a desktop OS now.
This happens with businesses too. Look at mcdonalds. Started with burger (with/without cheese) fries soda. All drive thru. But they had to sell more so they increased the menu options. Then seating. Then breakfast.
And now others are going back to the basics and undercutting them.
The rule is “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations” for a family run owned business.
It’s kinda like buying a house…
Initially you have this nice, clean EMPTY house so you go out and buy furniture and decorations to suite your taste and now you have this relatively sparsely furnished house that is easy to clean and maintain.
Years later most people wind up with a house that is chock full of old furniture, nick nacks, books, magazines, pantries loaded with old cans of who knows what or when it was purchased…
It’s in our nature to add stuff and try to hang on to stuff. That’s what we do and since software is no more than a reflection of the human condition (now there’s a topic we could discuss for hours on end) it winds up like everything else that we touch. It’s not about the features, the frills or even the task… It’s all about the fact that most of us are packrats and we try to pack as much into whatever it is as we can and then hang onto it even when it’s clearly to our advantage to get rid of it.
Trust me on this, I’ve been a developer for over 20 years and I’ve seen this pattern over and over and over again.
How many times have you had a user that just had to have a feature that they hardly ever use and could do it almost as efficiently manually or perhaps by reworking their work plan eliminate it altogether? More times than you care to count probably.
It’s kinda like MS Word, it’s got everything including the kitchen sink and they’ve added some really maddening stuff. Like the way the changed the default behavior of style sheets to update the normal style with changes that you make automatically so if you don’t turn it off your document suddenly disintergrates right before your eyes when you change say the ruler in a descendant style and until you do turn it off the more you try to correct it the worse it gets! Who came up with that feature and why? Because some user somewhere thought it would be a good idea? It drives me, and everyone that I’ve ever talked to about it, absolutely mad! Changing word processors isn’t the solution since Word has just about killed all of it’s competition.
My advice is, keep it sparse, if you don’t need it or use it once in a blue moon then don’t add it.
Anything with the word “Logitech” in its title. Guaranteed to also be designed for shit, as well as bloated.
Snagit. Holy fuck, snagit developers. Put down the compiler and step away from the computer. I’m all about Cropper for capping from the screen nowadays.
Also: orange.