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How Times Change
From a 1986 interview with Bill Gates for the book Programmers At Work:
A decade later, Microsoft seemed to have abandoned this philosophy wholesale. They became synonymous with feature bloat (from my perspective, MS Office usability peaked in about 1997) and software that ran slower with every release. Gates has had one of the sharpest minds for the business of computing and presumably realized that features outsell performance, particularly in enterprise which is where the real money is.
Features are kind of crummy in a way, because the more features you have, the bigger the manual is. And features are only beneficial if people take the time to use them, whereas speed–if you can print the pages faster, or show it on the screen faster, or recalc it faster–that’s worth an incredible amount. If you can give the users a few simple commands and make the program efficient enough to do what they want with those few commands, then you’re much better off.
A decade later, Microsoft seemed to have abandoned this philosophy wholesale. They became synonymous with feature bloat (from my perspective, MS Office usability peaked in about 1997) and software that ran slower with every release. Gates has had one of the sharpest minds for the business of computing and presumably realized that features outsell performance, particularly in enterprise which is where the real money is.
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