🔗 Keeping feature creep at bay

Somewhere along the way to becoming the bestselling software suite, feature creep ate Microsoft Office. Word 1.0 was almost minimal, with only 17 commands like copy, delete, help, and quit. Wouldn’t it be nice if Word did more? the customers asked, and Microsoft obliged. One feature at a time added up over seventeen years to 31 toolbars, 19 task panes, and over 250 menu items in Word 2003.

“We became bloated gradually, and then suddenly it was too much,” recalled Steven Sinofsky, then-senior vice president of Office. “There was literally nowhere to put all the new features.”

The Office team redesigned everything in 2007, containing the complexity in a tabbed ribbon that expanded to show features as needed. Google Docs, meanwhile a year earlier, had started winning hearts with a clean slate. Its more minimal word processor featured a fraction of Word’s features, but added the two things Word didn’t offer: A price tag of free, and live collaboration. Microsoft took a half decade to catch up.

It’s easy to decry feature creep, with a know-it-when-you-see-it certainty that this feature, this toolbar you never use, is flotsam. But one man’s flotsam is another man’s feature. Thus the Jargon File’s 1983 definition of what it then called creeping featurism: “A systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed.”

The tricky part is in dialing in the complexity to empower power users, without adding what feels like bloat to everyone else.