Defeating Feature Fatigue (2006) (opens in new tab)

That of course doesn't mean that both it's perfectly fine to have a niche product that perfectly solves a problem few people have, some features really aren't used by anybody. It's just that things are not always simple.

Why the mouse pad with clock, calculator and FM radio was a dumb idea? Because each feature was orthogonal, and them being in a mouse pad actually reduced utility. For optimal use, I want the clock be in visual range, FM radio be in audio range and within arm's reach, the calculator is something I might want to reposition or take with me when I get up, etc., while the mouse pad forces a particular location on my desk. It's the "mouse pad" ingredient that breaks this - as modern smartphones show, FM radio + clock + calculator together is a good idea[0].

Compare that with complex and feature-full applications like Word, Excel, Photoshop, or Blender. There, you may not use 90% of the features (everyone uses different 10%, though), but they all work on the same "work piece", and interact well with each other. As long as they're mostly out of the way when you don't need them, they're fine in the same application - and splitting them out would degrade each of them[1].

Compare that with Emacs - in particular its utility as mini IDE + TODO manager + dayplanner + better Jupyter + e-mail client + a bunch more of stuff, at the same time. You could say all of these things should be their own applications, and you'd be right. They sort of are, if you see Emacs as a Lisp runtime with a text editor app bundled by default. The reason some people choose this combo is because for text-UI applications, Emacs offers the level of integration that's much superior to what regular operating systems give you. A bunch of completely orthogonal features end up reinforcing each other - improvements to IDE carry over to editing your e-mail, you can quickly glue together e-mail with your TODO list, etc.

My point being, bundling features is bad when they interfere with each other; it's OK if they complement each other; it's very much desirable if they reinforce each other.

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[0] - For frequent use, hardware calculator with real buttons is better, though.

[1] - Sort of. Power users appreciate tools like imagemagick to quickly do some of the things you'd do in a bitmap editor, without having to start up a larger environment. Or, more importantly, the ability to operations in batch mode. But just because a power user might use imagemagick to batch-generate thumbnails, doesn't mean Photoshop should lose the "resize image" function.

> Put simply, what looks attractive in prospect does not necessarily look good in practice. Consumers often become frustrated and dissatisfied with the very cornucopia of features they originally desired and chose. This explains a recent nationwide survey that found that after buying a high-tech product, 56% of consumers feel overwhelmed by its complexity.