Friday, January 01, 2010

Suffering from Featuritis

Recently our users (you guessed it right, users) started at evaluating piece of application to fill a gap in our business needs. In the process, after they liked a system they asked me to look at it. The system have a bunch of frameworks written in Java but only runs on windows!

Why does people do this things in a vacuum? People like the fact that systems offer many features beyond their needs. It seems the primary driver for evaluation is Fear. Fear of being perceived as having fewer features than competitors. Fear that build will take forever and we won't be viewed as complete. Fear that the most features wins and when needs come we won't be ready. Non-experts want a Universal application. Users eventually know for them to Rule, they need to customize the general purpose application. What if instead of tones of features, we concentrate on making the application much easier to use with fewer features?


At least, I'll be satisfied to know if a java based application could complies with the Java specification on running on multiple platform (that is the premise of Java, isn't it).