Yesterday, I started writing a monthly column for Amazon’s End User Blog. For my first column, I looked at a really cool device that’s battling something I call Feature Creep:
…it’s increasingly difficult to find things that do just one thing, and do it very well. I blame this on something I call “Feature Creep” which I suspect comes from too many meetings, too much input from marketing, and not enough product managers and engineers who are willing to stand up and say, “You know what? I don’t think this coffee maker really needs an MP3 player in it. It’s fine just making coffee.”
Feature Creep is everywhere, bloating our software, lengthening our startup times, cluttering up our menus, and draining our batteries, so when I come across something that has successfully resisted it and stayed focused on doing one simple thing very well, I have a little bit of a pants party.
One of the best examples I’ve come across in the last year is the Netflix player from Roku. It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.
So I’m pretty excited to have an opportunity to do for blog what I used to do for InDigital, and I’m looking forward to examining various gadgets and technology trends in the mysterious future. My column will update on the final Thursday of every month.
(If you missed this on Twitter and don’t know what the title of this post means: I put a really stupid typo into this column that snuck past me and my editor, and I was originally lamenting how feature creep is “boating” our software. Mmmm. Boating. It’s since been corrected, but I can’t help giggling about it.)
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Boating our software? Boating software is my specialty, Skipper! (Skipper?)
Nice article; explains Roku very well. Going to show this to mr. angie k so that we can add it to the list of technology to get. (We have a way around the Roku box but it’s not as elegant.)
Cheers!
This is really cool. I’d love to hear more about physical device feature creep. The problem is, often, that people start with a list – and when they’ve designed everything in the list, they ship it. Nevermind the effing list; while it’s an item on a list, it’s tough to conceptualize (especially for physical device stuff). Prototypes are so helpful for this. Problem is (which you allude to, too many meetings, marketing, etc.) most decisions get made while stuff is a “list.”
Agile helps software design with this…but, it requires a big commitment to Product Management – to only include what is needed, ship it, and iterate.
So. What is needed? What’s the minimum? Those aren’t sexy questions. They sound like “how little can we get away with” or Apple-ism to some folks. That’s scary.
I was putting together some thoughts yesterday about product backlogs, in fact. I’ll share: Product Stakeholders are sad if you tell them that their feature (a thing on a list) won’t ship; they’ll feel comforted when you put it on the backlog, below other, more-important stuff; then, they’ll feel relieved when the product ships without it, avoiding bloat. Sadness, Comfort, and Relief. Maybe that’s my Agile tagline. My 3. Word. Tagline.
If I may, on a conscious level I’m sure you did, in fact, mean to write “bloating”. However I believe your Freudian-esque slip of “boating” belies your sub-conscious’s deeper understanding of the true nature of the modern electronic device. Yes, devices are in fact gaining in functionality. Manufacturers clearly see this as a means to greater market share. They see it as a “life boat”, if you will, as in “everybody in the life boat”. They believe the addition of functionality into this grand “boat” will allow them to stay afloat in the crashing waves of the ever changing market. This “boating” clearly has a tipping point, however, where it all begins to capsize. It’s the point where the women and children that make up the fundamental core “boat” of the product begin to panic and cry because there aren’t enough supplies in the boat to keep everyone alive for very long. And on many modern devices, those supplies can’t be refreshed unless you return them to the manufacturer… ship…. whatever. Hence we have a real problem as we move from the “boating” of piece of software’s necessary and sympathetic elements to the addition of the fat guy from 4G that keeps hogging the shrimp at the midnight buffet (you know who you are). So your base point is still accurate in that, in fact, while boating might seem like the ideal way to stay afloat, it is inherently less stable and more prone to upset than the bedrock on which the ship …. manufacturer… whatever… has already crashed.
well, I suppose that if you put enough bloat into a piece of hardware, it could become a boat anchor.
But be careful, Wil. Too many typos in an article will result in chows.
Great post. Feature creep annoys the hell out of me. As a software engineer, I find that feature creep comes from a number of different places…mostly from not asking real bona fide end users what they want or what they do.
-Geeks want to build cool shit so they try to put cool shit into the stuff they build. Not all of it belongs there. Geeks think it would really be cool if users could do X…it’s even better if they can do X in 10 different ways (except that most users aren’t Geeks).
– Marketeers want to have an advantage but no disadvantage so that if Competitor X’s product has A, B, and C, then so must ours. If Competitor Y’s product has A, B, D, E then so must ours. If Competitor Z’s product has A, B, C, F, then so must ours. So our product has A, B, C, D, E, and F and it’s behind schedule and all it really needs to do is A really well and nobody can say why anybody’s product does B except that everbody’s product does B.
– Business people want no market to go untapped. There just aren’t enough consumers in the coffee maker market but whoa, if we can tap into the MP3 thing, ka-ching. Business people also think they know what users want, because, well, they use the computer so they must know, right? Wrong. They also want to encode current analog business processes, contexts into computers without asking if this makes sense. Ever been talking to someone on the phone and they say, “I can’t do that”. They can’t. Their business process has been moved from paper to computers and there is literally no way to account for exceptions. Oh, and they’re being timed on how fast they handle your call.
I could go on but I have to put some more features in the software I’m writing…
“Skipper.”
Ha! I see what you did there.
Dude, you just blew my effing mind.
It reminds me of those fridges three or four years ago that came with TVs in their door… It seems that people think doing one task at a time is boring, but in turn it’s hard to find people (or objects) that can do one task really well, or even devote their attention to even try.
The flip camera (http://www.theflip.com/) is an object that resists “Feature Creep” quite successfully.
Wil, I loathe Feature Creep! The new Nintendo DSi apparently sacrificed backwards compatibility (as well as the ability to use things like rumble packs and play Guitar Hero) in order to install a digital camera. What?!? I will stick to the DS Lite for as long as possible.
Also, just wanted to tell you that I just today finished reading Just a Geek, which I got for Xmas, and loved it!
Well said.
As an engineer who regularly has to defend against pressure to add feature creep requests, it is not always so easy to take the stand. However, the costs of FC too often do not pay off.
It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.
Except that my friends Roku box now has a front end menu. It only has Netflick for now, but there is a notice that eventually other types of download will be added.
See, I equate it with a phrase that Alton Brown uses a lot: “Unitasker”. We want our stuff to do more than one thing, but I agree that the basic functionality of why you are buying the product in the first place should not be compromised.
Case in point, my cellphone takes pictures, plays music and can be used as a video camera. What I want it to do, of course is make and receive calls and texts. Fortunately, it does that well enough that I consider the other stuff bonus.
Congrats on the new column, Will. And thanks for giving those of us in the Twitterverse first crack at it.
This isn’t feature creep, from its conception the darn thing was designed to do a lot more than stream Netflix.
Boating software? Well, that explains a helluva a lot! I always thought that getting nauseous at the mere thought of having to interact with Windows Vista was some sort of psychosomatic thing. Turns out it was just good ol’ sea-sickness! Thanks, Wil!
I didn’t notice the misspelling until the section where you pointed out the typo. I auto corrected it to “Bloating” for you I guess.
Boating software. Surfing the internet. Ports. Anchor tags. What is this computer geek fascination with aquatic or nautical imagery? Weird. My crazy thought for the day.
An interesting and informative article nonetheless, sir. It’s hard enough to stay my hand from clicking on “Add To Cart” all the time at Amazon. Thanks for giving me one more damnable reason to keep going back there. *sighs for effect*
I just found my install disks for DOS 6.22 today in an old box….the three computers I have around me here don’t even HAVE disk drives anymore. Think about it, a whole OS on three disks…
Today, you need an ocean liner for that.
Sometimes it seems like the whole world subscribes to Netflix, but for the rest of us perhaps it would have been worth mentioning that the $99 up-front fee doesn’t yield any Netflix content without also sending them at least $9 per month.
Dude, you’re right. My bad. I apologize for the error.
Can I just say that what I really want is just a cell phone with a decent keyboard for texting. I don’t want a camera in the damn thing. I don’t want a flashlight. I don’t want it to calculate tips for me, or play games. I just want a phone with keyboard. Hate that.
Be glad you didn’t get hooked into the Xbox’s marketing campaign that is confusingly similar… except not only do you need the Netflix subscription to stream movies to the 360, you *also* need a Live subscription.
I couldn’t agree more about “feature creep.” But the manufacturers just don’t get it, as evidenced by that cell phone “for seniors” which does ONE thing…makes and receives telephone calls. Hello? I’d like my devices to do the one thing they were designed to do, and to do that thing really well. And as long as I’m asking for the moon, maybe they could last a lot longer too! As we become more eco-aware, “Planned Obsolescence” should be obsolete, don’tcha think?
Uh…by which I mean that it’s not only seniors who want devices that work well at the thing they were designed to do…
Two of my favorite reasonably non-BOATED pieces of software (snicker): EditPad Lite, and DarkRoom. Great writers’ tools, with EditPad Lite being more of a programmer’s tool, methinks, and DarkRoom bein’ more of a tool for journlin’ your way into the briny deep! Arrrrrrrrrrrr!
Wow. All this BOATING has caused me to descend momentarily into PirateSpeak.