Story Archive October 19, 2002 (Page 1 of 1)

Something which has bothered me about new versions of standard software in the past years has always been that they offer features hardly anybody needs. It is probably a safe guess that 95% of all Word/Excel users never use more than 5% of all the options. They probably don't even know and don't want to know about most of them. And that at the same time the makers of Windows have not yet succeeded in developing a basic useful tool like e.g. a search of your own little hard disk which in terms of speed and relevancy can compete with a Google search covering the whole gigantic internet.

All the new features offered obviously bloat the software and though computers become faster and faster programs usually don't. On the contrary they become slower and more instable. The acceleration of CPU's and hard disks is overcompensated by the increasing complexity of the programs which results in enormous bulky 500+ MB software packages full of bugs.

The worst thing of a switch to a new version usually is the time-wasting adaptation to it (if the installation works properly in the first place) and the recustomization to the old user interface which had proved itself in practice. Take the annoying pop-up paper clip which came with Office 95?, a graphical gadget pretending to help with questions which always was a total waste and time-consuming to get rid of it. Or the shrinking menus in a later version (2000?) only showing those menu items you had used in the last couple of days. I somehow managed to disactivate them but it took me some time and I don't remember how I did it.

All these lame ramblings just serve as an intro to a contribution to a kuro5hin discussion titled An Apology For Simple Software. The post in question offers an interesting explanation for the tendency towards feature overload in recent software:

9#39 Acolytes (4.76 / 17) (#39) by epepke on Wed Oct 16th, 2002 at 11:32:08 PM EST

I categorize people a little differently, as novices, acolytes, and experts. One of the things that has happened and has driven computing in a direcion that makes me unhappy has been the predominance of acolytes over the past few years.

Traditionally, the term "acolyte" has meant someone studying to be a priest. A computer acolyte is somewhere between an amateur and an expert, who very much wants to think of him and/or herself as n expert but isn't quite there yet.

Hard systems are for acolytes, not experts. When you get into the expertlevel, the tools get simpler. Consider cooking. A blender for the home cooking acolyte typically has buttons for 14 different speeds, labeled creatively as chop, whip, beat, liquefy, puree, and nine others. If you go into a restaurant, the blender has a single toggle switch: on and off. The acolyte will use a Kitchen Magician or a food processor; the chef will use a knife. The acolyte will have a smart, self-cleaning range and oven with all sorts of features. The chef has a chunk of iron with fire inside it.

The acolyte gets off on the niftiness of a complex system, because succesfully using the system is in and of itself an ego boost. Acolytes also love words like "professional," which originally applied only to medicine, clergy, and law, but which is a good chest-swelling word. The disdain for anything but Emacs is an acolyte characteristic; experts generally don't give a rat's and just use what they have. I've been doing this stuff for a quarter of a century, and I think I'm an expert. Back during the dot com boom, when the world was swarming with acolytes, I was talking to another expert. He said that on his resume, as one of the tools he knew for web development, he put "notepad." I thought this was great.

Novices generally prefer simple tools that do one thing they want to do. Acolytes prefer complex tools. Experts prefer simple tools that have the property of synchronicity. Unx is an expert system not particularly because it is complex, but because it's synchronistic. There isn't a single executable in Unx which is anywhere near as complex as, say, MS office, but the tools fit together in ways that allow the expert to do anything.

Another thing is that acolytes feed acolytes. Acolytes are good at producing programs that satisfy acolytes. You need experts, though, to produce tools that will satisfy novices or experts, and experts often look at acolyte tools with some disdain, talking about featuritis and windowitis.

Using the same categories concerning weblogging software I like to think of Blogger as for the novices, Manila as for the acolytes and antville as for the experts. I must admit though that I don't really know Manila and I neither consider myself an expert in weblogging in general nor in antville specifically. But antville definitely is very simple to use and offers almost endless customization possibilities via those modular little bits of html code called skins and the macros for the pros.