

Ask HN: Less features with new releases. Have you done it? - rokhayakebe

Does anyone here have experience with having less and less features over time?
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j-g-faustus
A company I worked for tried to remove a feature:

One release added a "tagging" feature (similar to Gmail tags) while the next
release had a "hierarchical folders" feature (similar to Outlook folders).

The thinking was that tags and folders did pretty much the same thing, and
folders were clearly superior since they were hierarchical. So we stripped the
tagging and shipped with just the folder feature.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there turned out to be customers that had built a
whole lot of import/export/processing infrastructure around the tags, and were
less than happy about having to reimplement it all using folders. Plus they
had a ton of tagged data and we hadn't included a tool to convert the old
format to the new one. (Because we thought noone were using the tagging
feature, it had only been in the product for a single release.)

The lesson learned is that released features are similar to published APIs: If
you remove or change them you will inevitably break something for someone.

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qtvali
I think that some operating systems have gone like that way - features are not
always removed, but some feats are harder and harder to find; other parts are
replaced with automatic parts, which will have hardcoded or automatic answers
to questions, which were asked before; some tools are removed, because things
get better and you dont need them anymore. I am sometimes really surprised
when I think that nowadays OS is basically desktop, window and one toolbar and
start/K/whatever menu - of course, there is a lot more, but it all orbits
around this simple set of things, which clearly do not evolve into bigger
complexity and more functions, but more like into elegance, simplicity and
features over functions.

------
uncoder
Never. If your product is generating revenue and profit, the profit the only
wise thing is to invest in the product. If you do so, the product will have
more features and becomes bigger. If you did not, your competitor will have
done so, and will have innovated to a build a better business.

~~~
eru
I guess rokhayakebe is asking if anyone around here went the route of making
your product better by making it simpler i.e. removing features.

