How do you explain the fact that the pencils I buy today are a lot more sophisticated, more comfortable, and have more features (refillable lead, advancing the lead via shaking) than the pencils I bought 10 years ago? The cost of a simple pencil is like $0.05. The pencils I buy are almost $10.00 each + lead + erasers. I like the $10.00 pencil guys' business plan a lot more than the $0.05 pencil guys' plan.
I have nothing against adding features that make sense, and are refinements of the workflow.
Adding a comfortable pad to a pencil makes it easier to use, and is certainly worth a bit extra to people. Adding replaceable erasers adds more, and so on.
Those are potentially useful features, and they don't get in the way of people using the pencil.
This is the sort of refining that should always go on. How can we make things easier for our users. How can we streamline their workflow.
Part of the problem in adding feature comes when you start adding features which make the base case harder. When users start to look at the vast sums of things that CAN be done, and you lose the simplicity of the tool.
Another problem is that adding features allows people to hack things, in ways that are more complex than they should be, and cause user-frustration.
Let me give you an example-
There was a small company I knew that kept its data in a series of excel files. They were small, and it was a quick and easy to keep track of what they were doing.
As the company started to grow, they started needing more and more complex reports on the data, and were running into the limitations of what they could easily do.
They started working with heavy scripting in Excel, using VBA scripts to copy data from one sheet to another, and to replicate it to backup excel files.
Eventually they had a mess of files talking to one another, doing CSV exports, then parsing them and creating new files, and the like. It worked.. Kinda.. But it was kludgey, and complex.
The problem was that they kept adding new features to their excel documents, rather than accepting that excel was Great at what it did [1], but it wasn't the right solution for them any more.
Eventually, if I recall, they finally got it all moved over to a series of Access databases, which made things a lot nicer.
Could Microsoft add features to Excel to make it easier for them to keep pushing it? Sure..
Should they? In this case, probably not. The features you adding need to make sense for the tool.
