George Ou stirred up a lot of controversy over on ZDNet recently when he said something I've been thinking for years: who cares, in these days of cheap storage, if an application has "too many" features? You can read his opinion at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=479.

So-called "feature bloat" may have been a legitimate issue when a few hundred megabytes of disk space cost several hundred dollars. Today I can buy a 750 gigabyte hard drive for $250 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014+103530113+1035320984&name=750GB). If Office 2007 Pro requires 2 GB of disk space (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ha101668651033.aspx#5), so what?

Some folks said George's grocery store analogy wasn't valid; I disagree. Those who say they aren't having to pay for all the stuff in the grocery store don't understand how business works. Built into the price of those items that are bought frequently is overhead for the ones that sell less well or have lower margins, as well as the cost of housing all those items you never use.

For years and years and years, I went to the grocery store and never once bought Ambesol (toothache medicine). I could have called that whole section of the store "bloatware" -- but then one day I got a toothache and I was glad it was there. I didn't have to trek off to a different store to find it while I was in pain. Same way with some of the Office features. I might never use them -- until one day when I have a special case and I suddenly need that feature, and when I do, it'll probably be when I'm up against a deadline and it's really nice to have it right there and not have to go download/pay for a separate program to do what I need to do.

Bottom line: software customers don't realize how well off they are. If you pay for commercial software like Office, you get a lot for your money. If you don't want to pay, there are free options out there, like Open Office, that work pretty well.  If you don't use all the programs, there are a number of editions to choose from that have fewer apps. If all you use are Word and Outlook, just buy those programs individually instead of the entire Office package. If you don't want all the features, you can do a custom installation and reduce what gets installed.

But when you talk about software "bloat," don't compare just the file sizes of today's programs with the file sizes of those fifteen years ago. Also compare the relative percentage of space today's program takes on a $300 hard disk, vs. the percentage that program of fifteen years ago took up on a hard disk that cost $300 back then. I think you'd find that today's programs, which give you so many more features and options and so much more functionality, aren't really bloated at all.

deb@shinder.net     www.debshinder.com
"Never enter a battle of wits unarmed."