

Features are a one-way street. - craigbellot
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1118-features-are-a-one-way-street

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jpeterson
_A couple weeks ago, they decided to pull the feature because it was too
confusing and it wasn’t adding value._

This is wrong. If the feature weren't adding value, the users wouldn't care if
it disappeared. In this case, it added the value of allowing a family to have
separate queues and ratings with a single account. Whether Netflix was able to
capitalize on that value is another story...

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johns
I think he's saying NetFlix _thought_ it wasn't adding value, which it clearly
was.

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jpeterson
I don't think so. The whole point of his post is that once you introduce a
feature, users will demand you to keep it even if it doesn't add value.

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BRadmin
with 82M subscribers, 82-164K using this feature, and 1286 comments -- a large
majority of the userbase was getting no value out of it, while a small
proportion was.... it's not so easy to define 'value' in a scenario like this.

~~~
ericb
Percentage wise, 164,000 is low for netflix. However, many people here would
kill for 164,000 users.

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dkasper
Another good example of this is in microprocessor architecture.

A long time ago instructions were added to the x86 architecture to make life
easier for assembly programmers. These instructions are large and take many
clock cycles to execute.

Today since most people don't code in assembly and because modern processors
have longer pipelines these instructions are rarely used. However Intel and
AMD still have to support them on every x86 chip to maintain backwards
compatibility despite the fact that they aren't adding much "value".

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gaius
I'm not sure how much of an issue that really is. A modern x86 processor is a
decoder for the x86 instruction set in front of a RISC core to do the actual
work. x86 instructions are not directly executed anymore. So long as it's
efficient instructions by the time it reaches the core, who really cares how
many cycles it took on the original hardware?

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Lozzer
I think the issue is more about wasted space on the chip rather than
performance.

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axod
I disagree with this.

Whatever you do, some subset of your users will moan. You need to see what
sort of % of your userbase is pissed, see if you can please everyone (User
prefs or something) etc

This post seems more like an excuse as to why some products have hardly any
features to me.

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JesseAldridge
They could've pulled the feature if they really wanted to.

People might have yelled and screamed for a bit but they would get over it
eventually.

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dgreensp
Like others have said, I think 37s just wants another chance to say "don't add
features". This is old advice by now, though it's still good advice to take,
depending on what you would otherwise do. Some web apps these days might
actually take it too far.

Also, as I've read others complaining about, 37s seems to treat bugfixes and
features similarly. I used Backpack for a while and am still slightly bitter
that I couldn't put snippets of code in notes. I forget the details, but their
handling of angle-brackets in code did something obviously wrong, like double-
escaping, and I wasn't able to get anyone there to even understand the
problem.

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derefr
Basically, it's like stone carving--you can shape the stone, but once you've
made a dent, you can't put the chips back without restarting. If you have
severely invested into some really _boneheaded_ design choices, the best way
out might actually be to spawn a sub-company, have it create a "lightweight
competitor" to your own product (designing it the correct way) and then merge
the company back in, throwing away your product and using its.

Thinking about it, I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't do this.

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tptacek
It's hardly a unique 37Signals insight that features are harder to remove than
to add.

