3 ms·

Why every successful product has to be bloatware?

istorical 5y ago
enterprise customers have large feature set requirements to support their enterprise scale, regulatory obligations, international presence + the tendency not to reject any feature request ask that could yield an additional customer combined with how unique feature requests often are between customers
- serverholic 5y ago
  Basically companies get bloated, then they need bloated software that supports all their bloat. They pay big money so they get what they want.
rchaud 5y ago
Because it wouldn't be worth billions otherwise. Feature bloat is a key part of the "emperor's new clothes" strategy that 'simple' products like Dropbox are pursuing, now that they're public and are under pressure to show growth. That's how you get stuff like Dropbox Paper.
- APock 5y ago
  Dropbox paper is amazing though if you need to create an "easy to collaborate that look decent" document. And it does not affect in anyway your experience with the "cloud sync" functionality
xeromal 5y ago
Corporate compliance
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Salespeople love bloatware. The more features salespeople can speak about the more successfully they can sell the product.
fouric 5y ago
Because software developers selling software are (1) incentivized to offer lots of features, because different individuals and businesses have different needs, but also (2) not very strongly incentivized to either (a) make the program particularly easy to use/integrating those features well with each other (which is one thing you might be thinking of when you say "bloatware") or (b) make the program particularly performant (which is another thing you might be thinking of). Open-source tools, while they might not always limit feature scope (e.g. Blender, Firefox, Emacs, Audacity, Krita) (although this isn't necessarily a bad thing), seem to be better at delivering good performance even for applications with larger feature-sets, partially because their developers are incentivized to optimize for performance due to their own pride.

enterprise customers have large feature set requirements to support their enterprise scale, regulatory obligations, international presence + the tendency not to reject any feature request ask that could yield an additional customer combined with how unique feature requests often are between customers

serverholic 5y ago
Basically companies get bloated, then they need bloated software that supports all their bloat. They pay big money so they get what they want.

rchaud 5y ago

Because it wouldn't be worth billions otherwise. Feature bloat is a key part of the "emperor's new clothes" strategy that 'simple' products like Dropbox are pursuing, now that they're public and are under pressure to show growth. That's how you get stuff like Dropbox Paper.

APock 5y ago
Dropbox paper is amazing though if you need to create an "easy to collaborate that look decent" document. And it does not affect in anyway your experience with the "cloud sync" functionality

xeromal 5y ago

Corporate compliance

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

Salespeople love bloatware. The more features salespeople can speak about the more successfully they can sell the product.

fouric 5y ago

Because software developers selling software are (1) incentivized to offer lots of features, because different individuals and businesses have different needs, but also (2) not very strongly incentivized to either (a) make the program particularly easy to use/integrating those features well with each other (which is one thing you might be thinking of when you say "bloatware") or (b) make the program particularly performant (which is another thing you might be thinking of). Open-source tools, while they might not always limit feature scope (e.g. Blender, Firefox, Emacs, Audacity, Krita) (although this isn't necessarily a bad thing), seem to be better at delivering good performance even for applications with larger feature-sets, partially because their developers are incentivized to optimize for performance due to their own pride.