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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I think pretty much every software company fails to understand that step 4 means you win. You're done. Close the code editor. You don't need to prove anything anymore. Put the software into maintenance mode, fix bugs, polish it off, make it faster if you can, but stop cramming features.

As a user, I've never in my life said "You know, software XYZ does everything I want it to, but since they don't randomly change the UI and update it with unwanted features every few months, it's 'stale' and I won't use it anymore!"

I feel like everything past step 4 is "Developers gotta develop and designers gotta design" and making changes for change's sake rather than the user's sake.

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The problem from an economic standpoint, and the article alludes to this, is that a lot of these platforms just aren’t profitable at stage 4. They might be ubiquitous, well loved by users, and have next to no meaningful competition, but if the money isn’t there they will be under the gun to iterate until it is. And even if it is the fear has been, and continues to be, that unless you’re becoming even more profitable each quarter by siphoning off excess value from your network that you’re basically failing at your basic function as a public company. I’m not sure I can think of a good example of this, Google used to be it, but they’ve gone so downhill in the last 10 years.

I don't think you can feature-cram your way to profitability. If you have a great product with loyal, paying users, and are still not profitable, then maybe the product isn't the problem. Jamming chat into your product is not going to make you profitable. Adding annoying notifications is not going to make you profitable. Moving all the buttons around to make a new UI is not going to make you profitable.

Marketing has the four P's. Software companies seem to just focus on changing one P (the most expensive and disruptive to change) and hoping for a miracle.

The thing is, a product that users love and a product that generates profits are frequently not the same product. You need to add more feature-cram to be profitable, and users hate feature-cram.

I see your point, but I don't think I agree. Yes, cramming unwanted features can kill a product, but so can going to "maintenance mode". Users can tell when a company has stopped caring. It may be a slow death, but it's death all the same, and eventually a hungry competitor will come along and eat your lunch.

Never have I felt this worse than with 1Password. The migration off is not pleasant because what they had and did well spoiled me so.

I moved over to bitwarden (using the vault warden branch for self hosting) and I love it.

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