Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the industry is really struggling with shipping “boring utilitarian things”. Rather than let software remain boring and just-plain-useful, it is forced to slowly transform into a nightmare of ads, pop-ups and other crap that is clearly NOT required for core functionality and ultimately the whole thing becomes awful to use.

Even when the intrusion is small, it is ridiculous because it is not required for the software to work (e.g. in the iPhone SETTINGS app, nothing about tweaking settings ever requires the user to view a stupid ad, and yet there they are, crappifying the UI).

And as I get older I am telling myself “this isn’t what I signed up for”: I want useful software that is free of garbage, especially when money is exchanged, and most certainly when a LOT of money is exchanged.

So tell these bean-counters to get the hell out, and let us make computers “only” useful instead of ad-spewing machines.

I blame "Product Managers" or "Product Owners". In my 20 years of being at different technology companies, I´ve realized that people in this position must come up with new "features", bells and whistles to keep justifying their job.

Think about say, Microsoft Word (only word, not office). Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version. But, where would all the "product development" arm of the Word application go if they declared it as such? The only required people would be "project managers" to manage bug fixes projects, and the development chain (programmers, QAs, etc)...

But these people have to eat, so they keep adding crap to an otherwise good product, they keep shuffling things around and "experimenting" to maintain their job.

> _Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version_ I am not sure, say for example the browser / Office 365 release version of Microsoft Word was very useful, and I'm sure they had to make _many_ changes in the desktop Word too in order to sync everything with the online word. That's pretty important I would say and it works great. The requirement of 'Feature completeness' keeps changing with times.

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