4 ms·

That seems like a feature, not complexity? It's not like it made deploying MS word any harder to add the fax button.

• jkaptur 3y ago
  Features interact combinatorially, which introduces complexity. Faxing isn't a great example, since from the perspective of most other features, it's probably just a special case of printing, but you can imagine it made it harder to build a web-based version of Word (what number are you faxing from? How does the computer in the MS data center contact or emulate it?)
  • pixl97 3y ago
    Heh, there is some saying along the lines of "Any one customer only uses 10% of the features your software provides, the problem is each customer users a different 10%" It's almost always a better bet to add more complexity to your product to capture more market than to make it as simple as possible.
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  The underlying OS could already do faxes (by treating them as a special case of printers and popping open an OS-controlled dialog to accept phone number &c). But Word bypassing all of that with its own fax drivers and protocols meant it could provide a full UX for the end-to-end of faxing (including, probably most importantly, scripting the fax send so you could merge from a phone number database)... At the added complexity of replicating an entire feature the OS already offered a slightly different way.