A Pernicious Trend: Massimplification

It hit me first with Apple and iMovie a year ago. They took a pretty good, pretty simple editing system (iMovie HD) and they took out the editing features to make it even simpler (iMovie 08). It was rebuilt from the ground up, based entirely on the assumption that most users, in spite of the product's name, don't want to make movies. They shoot bits of video with their cameras or phones, and want to share them. Trim off the edges maybe. But nothing like "editing." All that crap about reverse shots and cut-away shots and timelines was for video geeks, maybe a small percent of their users. From a business standpoint, it was the right move. Just because I happen to be in the "fringe" that wanted those features, I'm sure that making the software simpler will improve its use and their business objectives. Sigh. So I moved to Final Cut Express to do my basic editing.

Then there was my experience at Netflix. The Community, in particular, but in many other features of the website as well, there were lots of things we could design and build that would be really really cool for movie fans, from playing in social networks, to half-star ratings, to letting people search in their queue when they couldn't find something they knew was there. But it was clear that these were features that only appealed to those who were geeks (folks who loved social networks AND Netflix, or for people with so many movies in their queues that they lost things there). The fact was that these things mattered to only a tiny fraction of the subscribers, and there were a lot more important things we could do to add value, in particular, simplify the site. Less is often more. I know, i know -- I'm a movie geek -- and the cool moviefanish things I'd love to have don't always make good business sense. So I created a ning community for movie fans, and Netflix users in particular.

So at Macworld I was excited to see the new features coming out in many products, in particular, Intuit's QUICKEN. I've been using this product for eons, and while I don't upgrade every time there is new software, I keep my eye on it for when improvements seem to warrant the effort. I was excited, then, to see what was about to roll out. GASP. To my dismay I found that they were pulling a Netflix on me! They are removing a number of features I have come to rely on in my QUICKEN (its simple way of working was a nice little brother to the small business software we use at Petroglyph, Quickbooks...) but the new version seems all different. I'm still in shock, but i remember someone rationalizing the loss of many standard reports, and also explaining to me that they were changing finance "categories" to something more like tag clouds.

Tagging has its place, and i used to urge my partners at Netflix to use the more modern notion of tagging and move away from the archaic (Dewey-decimal-like) genres of classification, but this makes me uncomfortable in my accounting software!! Their simplifications struck me as hip but in the wrong direction. Still, one cannot escape their logic: only a small percent of their customers use QUICKEN to track their finances, balance accounts and follow portfolios. Most use it very lightly, and find most the features of little use or, worse, in the way. Just getting America to balance its checkbook would be a push, categorizing expenses across various accounts... face it, once again I'm in the unfortunate fringe.

INTUIT hasn't released this new version, and things might change before it comes out, and they certainly will add features over time. But I'm feeling the pain i often feel in the consumer space -- as these products are first released they are created for people more like me: early adopters, technically savvy and exploring of features. But over time, as markets grow, my needs represent a smaller and smaller portion of the products' direction.

Product success often leads to (and comes from) "massimplification," the focused simplification (or dumbing down, if you must) of a technical product to make it more useful to the largest number of people, often nudging out early adopters and creating niche product opportunities in the process. I don't like it. But it's better, I suppose, than the alternative: feature-creep. Microsoft, like many developers, tends to continue adding features to their products with each release, features that appeal to smaller and smaller numbers of end-users, their installed base of users, further and further alienating new users. I used to call this the Peter Principle of Software Development, which goes: a company will continue adding features to a product until it is almost unusably complicated; this inadvertently creates an opportunity for a new product to pick and choose which features are necessary, and who then can better optimize for new users. Both extremes are lousy, but when i write it out here, it looks like both ultimately create new product opportunities.

But I don't have to like it.