alt Hacker NewsWe should normalize "finished" software products that stop feature creep and focus strictly on bug fixes and security updates.
It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.
Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features just to chase new user growth often comes at the expense of confusing the existing user base. Not good
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This is one of the biggest issues in software development: So few projects are willing to admit that they are finished. I can probably count on one hand how many software products I use every day that actually get better (or stay the same) on update. The vast majority of them peaked somewhere around v1.0, and are just getting worse every time the developer touches them.
Dropbox is a great example. It's now a fundamentally different product than the original, and has re-created exactly the problem the original solved. There's no longer a good cloud-synced folder tool; everybody has gone back to implementing network filesystems that are much more complex and a badly leaky abstraction.
I think it's common in libraries of small to medium size. I often see Haskell and Rust packages that are not updated because full functionality achieved, no bugs and 100% test coverage.
Absolutely not the case with enterprise software. Zawinski's law is truer than ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165602
It’s funny, Express.js tried this. 4.x was basically a complete piece of software. There weren’t any great reasons to change the API.
But people hated that. They considered it “unmaintained”. They moved to Koa and Hono because they appeared to be more “actively maintained”.
You are basically describing all software ever shipped before webapps and online updates became a thing.
Companies wrote software and sold them in boxes. You paid once and it was yours forever. You got exactly what was in the box, no more and no less.
The company then shipped a new verson in a different box 1-3 years later. If you liked it enough, and wanted the new features, you bought the new box.