Death by a Thousand Buttons — from the Desk of van Schneider — Edition №268

Heinemeier Hansson: The funny thing is that most people were impressed by all the stuff Basecamp didn't do. They were used to these big, honking products that tried to do everything, where they just needed something simple.

Featuritis. The besetting temptation for the architect of a general purpose tool such as a spreadsheet or a word processor is to overload the product with features of marginal utility, at the expense of performance and even of ease of use. The appeal of proposed features is evident at the outset; the performance penalty is evident only as system te