4 ms·

I don't know. From what I've seen, a lot software gets built by a small group of people. It becomes wildly popular and the is maintained by a behemoth churning

by rcme 3y ago

I don't know. From what I've seen, a lot software gets built by a small group of people. It becomes wildly popular and the is maintained by a behemoth churning out minor features at a snails pace while everyone frets about the even the smallest product changes. It's easy to experiment and build when your product is small and few people use it. When you're bringing in real money and most of the Fortune 500 is using your software, it's a lot harder to add anything meaningful for fear of rocking the boat. And note, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the business is doing well, there might not really be a need for many new features.

jppittma 3y ago
Well, yeah, because the risk/reward of the decision making changes, purely in terms of dollars/second for an outage, never-mind legal and reputation risk.
- josephg 3y ago
  Also, the value of features follows a power law. Some features are incredibly valuable to everyone. Some features only a few people care about. And then there’s a long tail. In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams. At some point every product runs out of high value, visible features to add that anyone cares about. This isn’t a failure mode. It’s the opposite. This is the final state that most successful software should aspire to reach. I have a lot more respect for teams that understand this, and let their products find their UX steady state. Fastmail. Git. Vim. WhatsApp. And yes, Google docs.
  - remus 3y ago
    > In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams. I think this is pretty interesting, because I don't necessarily agree. If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel, but because this software has been around for a long time they're part of the standard interfaces for computers, like a mouse or keyboard. If you deviate too far from the current design people get confused and default back to what they know i.e. excel with all it's quirks.
    - josephg 3y ago
      > If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel I agree with you. But I also think at this point excel and google sheets are past the point where people would tolerate a radical redesign. If google or microsoft want to invent a better spreadsheet, I think it makes more sense to try those ideas out in a brand new product. Excel and Google Sheets are "done".
TeMPOraL 3y ago
And yet Microsoft manages to make regular, significant feature additions (and occasional, less nice/useful large changes), despite being a critical software dependency for pretty much all of the Fortune 500.

by rcme 3y ago

jppittma 3y ago

Well, yeah, because the risk/reward of the decision making changes, purely in terms of dollars/second for an outage, never-mind legal and reputation risk.

josephg 3y ago
Also, the value of features follows a power law. Some features are incredibly valuable to everyone. Some features only a few people care about. And then there’s a long tail. In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams. At some point every product runs out of high value, visible features to add that anyone cares about. This isn’t a failure mode. It’s the opposite. This is the final state that most successful software should aspire to reach. I have a lot more respect for teams that understand this, and let their products find their UX steady state. Fastmail. Git. Vim. WhatsApp. And yes, Google docs.
- remus 3y ago
  > In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams. I think this is pretty interesting, because I don't necessarily agree. If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel, but because this software has been around for a long time they're part of the standard interfaces for computers, like a mouse or keyboard. If you deviate too far from the current design people get confused and default back to what they know i.e. excel with all it's quirks.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel I agree with you. But I also think at this point excel and google sheets are past the point where people would tolerate a radical redesign. If google or microsoft want to invent a better spreadsheet, I think it makes more sense to try those ideas out in a brand new product. Excel and Google Sheets are "done".

TeMPOraL 3y ago

And yet Microsoft manages to make regular, significant feature additions (and occasional, less nice/useful large changes), despite being a critical software dependency for pretty much all of the Fortune 500.