Plugin Bloat (speeding up OpenOffice?)

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

David Kramer wrote:
|
| And my point (that hasn't been refuted) is this is exactly what most
| users are asking for.  More features.

Actually, I'd say that it's not so much that most  users  want  "more
features",  as  they  want  some  specific features that they've been
using with whatever software they've been using. But most users don't
use (or even know about) most of the features in the software they're
using; they only use the small subset that they've  somehow  stumbled
onto  and  learned to use.  The rest of the app sits there unused but
still occupying a chunk of memory.

I learned this very clearly back in the 80s,  when  I  worked  for  a
company  that  among other things made modems.  Repeatedly, the sales
guys would go to management saying "We can get this $N million  order
if  only  these few features are added to our modem." This is so that
the modem will function as a drop-in replacement for  whatever  modem
the  prospective  customer  is  now  using.   Orders came down to the
developers that these few features be added ASAP. After a dozen or so
such  sales-driven  feature  sets,  the  result was a bloated mess of
confusing, incompatible features controlled by a flock of  mysterious
option settings. The features generally weren't very well documented,
because each was used by only one or  two  customers,  and  the  only
thing  important  was that a feature work correctly for exactly those
customers that used it.

The same thing is driving feature bloat in a lot of  linux  software.
We  constantly  read that "linux isn't ready for the desktop" because
it lacks such-and-such features.  Invariably, what this means is that
there  are  Windows  users  using  specific  software  that has those
features, and those users  won't  switch  until  the  linux  software
functions  as  a  drop-in replacement for their old software, so they
won't have to learn anything new.  In each case, this  doesn't  sound
unreasonable,  and it's not too hard to add just those features.  But
after it has happened N times, the result  is  a  bloated,  confusing
mess  of  incompatible features that attempt to mimic the functioning
of every version of a similar piece of Windows  software.   Then,  of
course,  the  users  don't switch because the mess of features is too
confusing. But you can't remove the features, because a few new users
have come to depend on them.

It's an old story in the computing biz.



--
What if the Hokey Pokey really IS what it's all about?

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