The Swiss Army Knife Syndrome: Why Great Products Die from Feature Bloat
The Complexity Creep Open Microsoft Word. Look at the toolbar. How many of those hundreds of icons have you clicked in the last year? Maybe 10? Now open Google Docs. It has perhaps 20% of Word’s features, yet it dominates collaboration. Why? Because it suffers less from Feature Bloat. Bloat happens slowly. No PM wakes up and says, “Let’s make our product confusing today.” It happens one rational decision at a time. ...