“Microsoft’s Office 97 contains 4,500 commands for features both useful and arcane.” in “Microsoft May Face Backlash Against ‘Bloatware’”—WSJ, 11/18/96
We did loads of user research to get to the bottom of this bloat sentiment. We even hosted a workshop at the annual ACM Computer Human Interface conference in 1998. While it was easy to find people who complained about 'too many features', nobody was willing to part with any. And when they got tucked away in expando-menus they wished they were there again. It's like the Joni Mitchell lyric from Big Yellow Taxi..."You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Leah Kaufman did the bulk of the research. We wrote a summary paper here: (sorry, ACM paywall) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/310307.310370
I remember Heikki saying "Install on Demand" or "Just in Time" (JIT) Install was really "just to late"; which goes along with the OAC's desire to "just installing everything".
052. Alleviating Bloatware, First Attempt
Yet again, this series (your book) continues to be educational beyond anything else I can imagine reading. Thank you for the continued effort here!
We did loads of user research to get to the bottom of this bloat sentiment. We even hosted a workshop at the annual ACM Computer Human Interface conference in 1998. While it was easy to find people who complained about 'too many features', nobody was willing to part with any. And when they got tucked away in expando-menus they wished they were there again. It's like the Joni Mitchell lyric from Big Yellow Taxi..."You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Leah Kaufman did the bulk of the research. We wrote a summary paper here: (sorry, ACM paywall) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/310307.310370
I remember Heikki saying "Install on Demand" or "Just in Time" (JIT) Install was really "just to late"; which goes along with the OAC's desire to "just installing everything".