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Perfect Software?

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Ralf Maximus:
I've noticed a kind of zeitgeigstial interest in "old" software, or previous versions of current software.  There appears to be a resurgence of web sites devoted to past releases of MP3 players, IM clients, and productivity suites.

This leads me to a thought and a question: does anyone know of a software company that said at some point, "this thing we make is as good as it needs to be, so we're not going to improve it anymore?"

I'm not thinking of projects where the developers ran out of steam, lost interest or capital -- I mean cases where somebody made an executive decision that anything more would be needless and bloatful.

Think how different the world would be if instead of Vista we had XP 2007, or Outlook went feature-complete in 2000.  Or if WinAmp stopped at 2.x.  I'm beginning to wonder if the "always add new stuff" mentality is starting to wane, if companies will notice the trend and question their direction.  Are we outgrowing the "newer is always better" mentality of the 90's?  Or are we forever doomed to next year's model?

So... any stories of arrested development?

Grorgy:
Thats a coincidence, or maybe not, appaholic, relequestual from the forum here, featured metapad, a notebook replacement just the other day which hasnt been updated for years, tho the help at the website has been updated to to include instructions for vista.

icekin:
I can think of CATIA, a 3D CAD tool that has not been updated much since 2001 when it hit v.5. Since then, it has had several revisions, currently on R17, but no major rewrite or feature changes have occurred. The advantage is that even the newer revisions run on the same hardware that the older ones did.

In a shop, the average consumer is simply going to buy the biggest box with the most features written on the cover. Few would stop think about how the extra bloat would slow their machine or whether they even need all those features in the first place. Companies end up bloating a software trying to capture this market. In some rarer cases, the developers start bloating the software because they start to believe that those added features will greatly help users.

I would personally love a world where companies focused on improving stability and portability of their programs rather than features. I especially dislike companies that release the same program with the higher version number and claim that new stuff has been added (e.g. AIM, Nero). Its best to have a modular structure and allow independent coders to write their own plugins. Firefox has this system and it has worked out quite well.

Darwin:
This is an excellent thread, raising and really interesting question. Sadly, I can think of many wonderful apps that were abandoned (but released as freeware) after a major OS upgrade (Win 3.x to 9x or 9x to XP etc.) but nothing that has been maintained and updated for years without a significant upgrade.

Unfortunately, as much as I recognize that this is desireable, I'm like those people in the box stores looking at packaging. I find it almost impossible to resist the urge to upgrade to the latest version of an application, even if my needs are more than met by the previous version. This is a complusion, and an often expensive one! I'm pretty sure that I'm not in the minority. I'm sure that software developers are aware of this mindset and keep piling on the features/tweaking the GUI/changing the code to accomodate it. Why? Two conflicting reasons: 1. This mentality will drive many users to DIFFERENT solutions, even if there is NOTHING wrong with the current one. There is the perception, familiar to anthropologists and sociologists, that stasis in culture or evolution is backward despite the fact that it is seen by practitioners as indicative of success and 2. It keeps revenue coming in because people like to buy actively developed software so either you've got a lifetime licence model and need to keep evovling your product to attract new users or you've got a paid upgrade model and need to keep your existing users coming back to fill your coffers (even if only a little)...

Both developers and end-users are caught in a vicious cycle - one that is ultimately counter-productive.

CWuestefeld:
A couple of examples come to mind. I'm not sure if it was a conscious decision on their part, but the fact was that these applications languished, and are now really historical footnotes.

* PKZip - While this did everything it aimed to very well, a "bloated" Windows app (WinZip) eventually cleaned its clock despite using the same underlying algorithms.
* Lotus 1-2-3 - Languished in the version 2 realm for ages, waiting for others (particularly Microsoft Excel) to catch up. Eventually a version 3 was released, but it was too little, too late. At one time "Lotus" was synonymous with spreadsheet, but now that name seems to carry the connotation of "Notes".
In both of these cases, while the app itself may have been well-suited to the platform it targeted, the evolution of platforms (particularly the triumph of Windows over DOS) sealed its fate.

A similar story is in progress for the super-organizer Zoot, but I hope that the sequel comes out before the story ends. This is still a 16-bit app, and has been passed by by the need for rich text and volumes of data beyond what its 16-bit space can handle. It's been tweaked continually, but hasn't had a major revision in several years. Luckily, there is now a public beta for a 32-bit port, so hopefully it will fight its way back (it deserves it).

This all seems to imply that even when an application is "just right", the developer can't just rest on his laurels. The evolution of the platform underneath him will eventually kill his product just as surely as poor quality might.

(edit: fix formatting)

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