

When less is more - yan
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14248430

======
beza1e1
I think the author misunderstood "Worse is better". Worse is not better
because it is somehow more attractive to users. It is a better strategy,
because by releasing early you get additional resources to continue building
the big vision.

Consider company BigCo, which starts a massive $10mil project that will
revolutionize the industry. It is epected to finish in five years. A small
startup builds a little product for $1000 in a year, which implements one of
the core features of BigCos vision. This is clearly a "worse" product. Using
the revenue of $0.1mil, they enhance their product. This yields $1mil revenue
after two years. Two iterations later the implemented BigCos vision in four
years with just $1000 starting capital. When BigCo releases their final
product it is already obsolete. This is how worse is better.

In the (Free) software world it isn't about money, but about users and
developers. Gabriel tells a Lisp vs C example in "Worse is better", where
"1987" is equivalent to the end of the five year period in my example: In
concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C
compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers
better than want to make Lisp compilers better.

~~~
scott_s
I don't think that even really captures what Gabriel was getting at.

The example he uses in the paper is from operating system design, where doing
the "right" thing was too hard to implement. The "wrong" way is simpler to
implement, and you get your OS written faster. Your OS now has a documented
design flaw, and people have to work around it - but everyone does because you
got your OS out first.

That is, he was more addressing design choices made when solving a problem.
The full discussion is in his paper. It starts with the sentence "Two famous
people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met
to discuss operating system issues.": <http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html>

~~~
gruseom
It's in fact hard to capture what _Worse is Better_ was getting at, because
it's sort of incoherent. I've tried 2 or 3 times to understand it over the
years and concluded that, beyond the most general point (which you describe
well, I think), it's not clear what he's really saying. I noticed Rich Hickey
said this the other day, as politely as one possibly could: _The arguments
made in Worse is Better are very nuanced and I'm not sure I understand them
all_.

[http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programmin...](http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/313989/-z_programming_languages_clojure?pp=2)

By the way, Dan Weinreb has an interesting piece in which he reveals that he
was the MIT guy and Bill Joy the Berkeley guy:

[http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-
the-...](http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-worse-is-better-idea-and-the-future-
of-lisp)

I recommend Kay Schluehr's comment on that page, which argues that arguments
like WiB are drawing overly general philosophical conclusions from instances
of success or failure in the market.

~~~
scott_s
I think Richard Gabriel himself demonstrated that the points were nuanced, if
not outright elusive, by writing a rebuttal to the essay with the title "Worse
is Better is Worse" under the pseudonym Nickieben Bourbaki.

Gabriel's full account of the essays he's written is on his website:
<http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html>

~~~
gruseom
I went through a phase of reading all that stuff a number of years ago.
Gabriel has a seriously pompous side, which I eventually couldn't bear any
longer (probably after spending time and money tracking down his "Patterns of
Software" book and then discovering how dreadful it was). But the piece you
link to is refreshingly free of all that... until, amusingly, the last
sentence, as if he falls off the wagon at the very end.

I don't begrudge him for being unable to make up his mind whether he agrees
with "worse is better". There are disadvantages to both approaches. But
there's no need to be a drama queen about it ("One fellow was seriously
nervous that I might have a mental disease") or inflate it into an
artificially large "philosophical" question.

------
fleaflicker
I've probably posted this here before but...

 _Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small
trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do,
you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely
is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the
work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think
about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly
immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people
to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get
something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost
works for me", and they'll get involved in the project._ \--Linus Torvalds

~~~
edw519
Thank you for posting this again, fleaflicker. I have not seen it before. It's
now on my bulletin board. I have a feeling it's going to make a big
difference.

------
shalmanese
"This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they
give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by
writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist
tries to find the ‘word count’ feature which they need because most
journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because
it’s in the ‘80% that nobody uses,’ and the journalist ends up writing a story
that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is
bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ‘cause it won't count my words."

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html>

------
tungstenfurnace
The problem is that businesses have to grow or they die, because they are
competing with other businesses, and because they are heavily taxed and
regulated. New features mean sales.

So it's mainly up to the consumers. As things are, if you want a simple
product made with love, you generally have to pay a premium (e.g. solid wood
furniture, swiss watch, etc.) Alternatively we could slow things down by all
becoming late adopters.

On the positive side, feature creep drives progress. Most new features are
rubbish, but every now and then one is found to be genuinely useful and it is
quickly copied by everybody else.

~~~
fburnaby
Good point on the feature-creep leading to innovation. Maybe it's not all bad
then!

But how can _I_ find the one product without all the useless crap while
_others_ pay for the mistakes on the road to innovation? These features are
still useless.

------
bsaunder
You gotta like an economist article including Lisp, Occam's razor and quotes
from Einstein and Colin Chapman.

------
te_platt
I think it is interesting how simplicity is a benchmark for the very best in
so many different fields.

Science: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -
Einstein. (actually an abbreviated version of a longer quote - go figure)

Writing: Brevity is the soul of wit. - Shakespeare

Mathematics: Consider Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes.

Architecture: Consider Frank Lloyd Wright's work over his whole career going
from relative complexity (prairie houses) to relative simplicity (Guggenheim
Museum). Or the work of one of my favorite architects, I. M. Pei.

Comments on web pages: ... I think you get the idea ...

~~~
eru
When proving a new theorem the first prove is usually ugly. Only later they
get ever more nicer and simpler. Since the fame of mathematicians rests mostly
on new stuff they discover, there's a saying that `mathematicians get famous
on the ugly proofs.'

------
wheels
It's interesting in the domain of pro-electronics -- audio gear, photo gear,
etc. -- you can often recognize the top of the line stuff by its relative lack
of features. They start adding a bunch of junk to "pro-sumer" lines to make
them impressive for people who want to look like a pro, but don't really know
what they're doing.

------
bsaunder
Almost surprised there was no mention of the "less is more" Unix joke
regarding the programs 'less' and 'more'.

UPDATE: (in the original Economist article).

~~~
yan
There was; it got downvoted a few times and I guess the author deleted it.

------
byoung2
I had a "less is more" thought when I was debugging my girlfriend's HTC Touch
Diamond last night. It's a Windows Mobile smartphone, and she deleted a
program. Then she kept getting an error on startup telling her a component was
missing and to reinstall the program. I ended up having to delete a shortcut
from the Windows\Startup folder to fix it. Sometimes I wish phones just made
calls!

~~~
jrockway
The problem is that Windows Mobile just sucks.

~~~
coolestuk
WM on HTC is pretty good. One of my major requirements is that a cellphone
should be able to share its internet connection with my laptop. On the HTC
that's easy (using bluetooth or USB, and it works with Vista,OS X,Linux). I'm
in the market to get a new phone (and even move telco), but when I see the
efforts involved in getting an iPhone, blackberry or Android device to do this
kind of sharing/tethering, I just stick with HTC.

~~~
jrockway
_I just stick with HTC_

You mean WM, but yes, this was a nice feature. Too bad nothing else on the
phone was usable. (If you really want to tether, just get a dongle for your
computer and save yourself the hassle. I find that Wifi is pretty much
everywhere, though.)

------
jpwagner
The Flip Mino is one example that could use more features. Actually if you did
not HAVE to use a tripod to remove shakiness, that would improve it ten-fold.

------
dlevine
I think the problem is that product manufacturers try to make everyone happy
with a single product. They gradually expand the product's definition in an
attempt to get more and more people to use it. The problem is that one of the
reasons why the initial users liked the product was that it was simple and
didn't have a million features. So you start to lose them, or they like your
product less.

------
emullet
I mostly agree with the article. On the other hand, adding more features isn't
necessarily a bad thing in the case of the netbook as long as price and
size/weight are still minimized or maintained.

------
edw519
I wish I had read this 2 weeks ago. Last night, I got my program working
perfectly, but too slow! I quickly did some bench marking and immediately
asked myself, "Why did I do it that way?" The answer: to get it to handle
everything I wanted. I had feature creeped myself without even realizing it.

Back to the drawing board this weekend. Same core functionality, but much
smaller footprint, and hopefully, much faster.

~~~
icefox
What about profiling? I hear that will often tell you what part of your
program is slow.

~~~
edw519
I know what part is slow. I still can't believe I did it that way. It wasn't
until last night when I put all the pieces together that I actually saw how
badly it sucked. I was trying to be "slick" when I should have just done the
job. Lesson learned (again).

