Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

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> When I see someone who claims not to like when software gets frequent updates, I ask myself: "Do you even like software?"

I used to. That's why I've dedicated 30 years of my life to making it.

But to be honest, not so much anymore. It's not just about breaking things, it's about CHANGING things. Things you paid for. Things you agreed to purchase in a certain shape and form. Forget video games, I'm talking about every day tools you use and depend on to do your daily job or life functions. Things like online banking - my bank suddenly rolled out a complete UX overhaul of their online system and omfg is it ever worse than it was before... I now need to take multiple steps and clicks to do something I used to be able to do in one step. They also broke the browser's back button etc.

And why does this happen? Not because brilliant teams of seasoned experts sat around the table, did focus groups and market research with existing customers to figure out how to make the product better. But because a lone Product Owner sees a path to promotion if they can figure out that one single killer feature that will get a massive new adoption of hypothetical new users (hardly ever realized). And so we, the end user, end up perpetual sacrificial guinea pigs in a never ending experiment that throws us under the bus because the business is chasing a hyper growth they are very unlikely to see.

If you're dealing with something like an indie video game, made by an individual or a small team of passionate people who actually care about their existing users and what to make things better for them then you're going to have a different experience. 99% of the tech industry today is not even in the same universe, let alone ballpark, as that.

To me, disliking greedy corporations and bad management isn't very connected to the method of delivery of products. Frequent and often automatic updates just represent that delivery method.

In contrast to your bank, my bank's website has added numerous improvements and modernizations that have made it easier, more useful, and less frustrating. Perhaps it's just time to switch banks?

There are plenty examples of badly managed products in the pre-SaaS era. If you bought Windows Me, it shipped as a terrible product and it never got better. As soon as you opened the shrink wrap you had no recourse but to wait for Windows XP to fix those problems.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City featured a bug where saving at the ice cream factory was very likely to corrupt your save. The PS2 had no ability to apply patches or updates to games, so you were just stuck with the software that way forever.

So, you "agreed to purchase it in a certain shape and form" – but just like any other product you never truly know what you get until you made the purchase.

You're straw-manning and shifting the goal post.

I have no problem with greedy corporations. What I don't like is people changing stuff on me when I didn't opt in to that change. Imagine if someone broke into your house and rearranged all your furniture. That's what it feels like. I don't like not owning my software and not being in control of things I pay for. I don't like not getting to decide if/when I upgrade and what I upgrade to. No one had to upgrade to Windows ME. That's my one and only point.

I don't know why you keep trying to shift the conversation back to video games. Video games are a very different type of software from most and I don't play them or have any interest in them. They're completely irrelevant to the conversation as far as I'm concerned.

Respectfully, I'm not straw-manning nor am I shifting any goal posts. Whether or not you agree with my arguments, I believe I am making them as consistently I can and in good faith.

I'm using video games are an easy example because it's simple to point to a specific gameplay bug that every player will encounter in those boxed games. Those kinds of experiences aren't as well documented for older productivity software. I understand you don't like video games but you should be able to understand the concept of my argument, for all purposes of our discussion these games can be considered to be generic software.

My overarching argument revolves around my belief that the bad things about software revolve around its business model, not from its delivery method in isolation.

>But because a lone Product Owner sees a path to promotion if they can figure out that one single killer feature that will get a massive new adoption of hypothetical new users (hardly ever realized).

This++. It's also the young hotshot phenomenon, where they come in and decide they can do everything better than the old timers (the previous hotshots 3-4 years ago), and change everything they can. We've all been there.

I have elderly family members, 85-plus, who can't understand why the UI changes all the time and they have to continually relearn. Explained this way, they get it, but still say, "they need to remember that not everyone wants to relearn everything every couple of years".

Yeah, I get frustrated about this A LOT. "Change for the sake of change", and chasing meaningless KPIs and metrics that involve ZERO value to users and only serve to benefit the vendor (usually at the expense of users, in fact).

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