Feature creep and bloated products

James Surowiecki has a lovely piece in the New Yorker this week about feature creep and bloated software. He talks about the "internal-audience problem":

the people who design and sell products are not the ones who buy and use them, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what’s best for consumers

The article mostly refers to physical artifacts, and he doesn't call out the major motivation that feeds software feature creep: the desire for annual upgrades. In the packaged software world you have to motivate customers to buy your product again and again, preferably every year. With subscription-based or free software, you just have to keep up with the competition, but with licensed desktop software you are competing against the version they have already purchased. via BoingBoing