Yesterday I wrote about Feature Bloat, it got me thinking about why some (most?) software programs end up full of things that few people use. One of the answers is to persuade existing customers to upgrade and thus bring more money in.

Consider this: You write a program which may or may not be novel. However, there is an initial rush of purchases, followed by a steady drop-off until the market is saturated; you’ve reached all the customers you’re likely to; or something else appears on the market which takes people away from your program.

Unless you charge for it on a subscription or support basis, you’ll eventually end up with little or no revenue and a bunch of customers who expect support for the product and/or want it to work with the latest version of their operating system (OS). One way of getting funds is to charge for upgrades to newer versions of OS. But, unless it’s a really good program, most people will expect that kind of upgrade for free.

So what do you do? What compelling reasons can you give your customers to upgrade? The simple answer is add more features. Adding features prolongs the life of your program whilst keeping it head-to-head with competitors’ products. This also provides the funds for supporting the program and possibly develop it further.

The snag comes in deciding what features to add. Some of these ideas come from competitors’ products. Others, curiously, from customer’s themselves who want to cram more things in (and this happens to even the simplest of programs).

My problem is that usually one finds that features are added without any real thought to what they will be used for. The designers of a program should go back to the program’s original purpose – it’s manifesto – and devise innovative additional features that enhance that purpose, not just bolt on ‘cool’ things that 98% of customers will never really use. Innovation increases the chances of holding on to existing customers and attracting others. Trouble is, innovation is hard work.