Facebook's complexity will be its doom

This is a problem that afflicts many big companies that have large teams of product managers, designers and programmers. In such organisations, huge effort is spent constantly redesigning and tweaking software, for little obvious gain. It is action for action's sake.

Not long ago I worked on a contract with a big media company in the UK. During the whole three months I worked there, the company was working on what was a stopgap redesign of the website. By stopgap I mean, this was a design that was to appear between the current design and the "proper" redesign that was still being drawn up.

In truth, the "proper" design being drawn up will probably be just another stop gap. So I was probably working on a stopgap design between two other stop gap designs.

Funny thing is that everyone knew that having a stopgap design was a ludicrous idea but no-one had the power to prevent it happening.

I think this happens because big companies end up with big design and development teams. They can't easily get rid of these teams and it isn't acceptable to leave such a huge team idly doing nothing. So instead they set them to work on adding ever more features to the product.

A much better option, of course, would be to set them to work on a completely new product.