Just Leave It Alone Already!

Innovate, improve, change.   Make it better, make it faster, make it cheaper.

Kill the product.

Some things just work the way they are and should be left alone.

Coca Cola.  O.K. it's not quite the same since they stopped using cane sugar, but close enough.

Several years ago I downloaded a spy-ware program which worked great.  It hooked up into "spynet" (for all you Terminator fans) and did a great job.  It had a little circle icon so you knew it was working.

Then Microsoft acquired the product and improved it.  It is now called "Windows Defender" and has a castle icon.   It automatically upgraded itself , worked for three weeks and died.  A very horrible death.  So I clicked on the repair button, and it came back with "file not found".  Pretty darn helpful. 

I fixed it.  I unistalled it and turned on Trend's anti spy-ware stuff. 

On the other side of the coin, it pays to really understand what people like about a product (maybe it's one feature which just is head and shoulders above all the rest).    Back in the good old DOS days, we all used a hot key program called Sidekick.  Great stuff.   No matter what you were doing, press a key and all your useful programs popped up.

Windows killed it, but somehow it always irked me to have to jerk a mouse around to pull up a set of programs to get something done.  And no, the Windows key didn't do it for me.

Turns out that Mac OSX has a way cool feature.  When you press f12, up pops a set of widgets you drag and dropped onto your desktop.  It is the coolest thing and people are writing all sorts of new widgets.   So sometimes you can improve on a good thing too.   

Comments

[Mary Schmidt]

Bruce,

Yes, I hate it when I hear Microsoft has "upgraded" or "improved" something - great, another cycle of debugging and new problems.

Unfortunately, this tendency to "improve" the product isn't limited to technology (or Coca-Cola) - cosmetics companies do their best to lose loyal customers. For example, I finally gave up on Prescriptives because my liking a particularl product or color was the kiss o' death. Yep, they discontinued it.

Compare and contrast to Morton Salt. Yes, they have several different variations of salt - but the basic logo and product hasn't changed in ages. And, they just keep trundling along.