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I think there's a very specific form of overengineering afflicting products currently, which I'd classify as "endless revisiting". This is where companies build something which works well enough, but then get trapped in a cycle of endlessly tweaking that one thing. Inevitably the amount of code churn in this one area combined with the need for some semblance of backward compatibility results in something that is fragile, complex and slow.

Plus the annoyance as a user that whenever you use this thing, all your tools are in a slightly different place and work slightly differently to how you left them. IMO there's a need for better balance between "it works well enough, leave it alone" and "we haven't fully optimised this workflow yet" in product development.




Yeah, I see this happening a lot as well. A prime example is Spotify. Their app is done. It has all the features it needs. Instead of just focusing on making those features work more reliably, they seem intent on doing a big UI redesign every few months, adding bloat to the app and making it more frustrating to use. It’s really rare to find companies that just build a thing and stop adding features once the core functionality is done.


I'm amazed how every version has been worse than the one before. The best version was out over a decade ago.


See also: Dropbox, 1Password, Gmail.

The list goes on.




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