Comment by xg15
3 days ago
Almost all of my nontechnical friends and family members have at some point complained about bloated and overly complicated software that they are required to use.
Also remember that Microsoft at this point has to drag their users kicking and screaming into using the next Windows version. If users were let to decide for themselves, many would have never upgraded past Windows XP. All that despite all the pretty new features in the later versions.
I'm fully with you that businesses and investors want "features" for their own sake, but definitely not users.
Every time I offer alternatives to slow hardware, people find a missing feature that makes them stick to what they're currently using. Other times the features are there but the buttons for it are in another place and people don't want to learn something new. And that's for free software, with paid software things become even worse because suddenly the hours they spend on loading times is worthless compared to a one-time fee.
Complaining about slow software happens all the time, but when given the choice between features and performance, features win every time. Same with workflow familiarity; you can have the slowest, most broken, hacked together spreadsheet-as-a-software-replacement mess, but people will stick to it and complain how bad it is unless you force them to use a faster alternative that looks different.
Every software you use has more bloat than useful features? Probably not. And what's useless to one user might be useful to another.