Small screens, big decisions: how mobile is forcing businesses to rethink software
This post was also published in VentureBeat. One of the biggest problems in software is feature bloat. Even sprightly new companies that base their competitive strategy on minimalism and ease of use can eventually fall prey to the same force that bogged down their predecessors. For example, one could argue that thanks to feature bloat, Salesforce is more complicated today than Siebel was when Salesforce first promised a simple, cloud-based solution. The promise of simplicity must quickly meet the business reality of closing deals or improving productivity — and for many software vendors, the promise of simplicity gets lost as they add customers, all of whom have feature requests. Feature bloat happens because as software vendors add diverse customers, they end up adding features that are rarely used or only applicable to fringe use cases — many of the same ones that plague their incumbent competitors — ultimately slowing down the software and adding unnecessary complexity.