In an article, “Hack Out the Useless Extras" in New Scientist magazine (June 6, 2004,. Vol. 182, No. 2450, page. 26), Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab founding chairman, 1999 Borland Conference Philadelphia keynote speaker, and author of The New York Times bestselling “Being Digital“, says “The speed and performance of software worsens with each succeeding release because of featuritis, the tendency to bloat new releases with features and options that monopolize the hardware’s improved speed and memory. What you actually get is 10 different ways to do the same thing, with fewer and fewer of them intuitively obvious." Bloatware keeps the costs of computers, phones, and other devices basically the same, “thanks to featuritis“.
He says that “users should reject the attitude that they are stupid, and that machines must be built the way they are.” Negroponte says the Media Lab is “focusing on simplicity in personal technology, and argues that two approaches to simplicity–one short-term and one long-term–need to be executed simultaneously. The short-term approach melds good design with a streamlining of features and options: Simplicity should be a rule of thumb for mainstream products, while dedicated, special-purpose devices could be created for consumers of advanced features by adapting software to make the hardware act in different ways. The long-term strategy is to imbue computers with common sense.”
Negroponte says "simpler machines can be much less expensive, and while consumers, I believe, want this badly, the manufacturers have little interest in making this happen because the high end of any market is more profitable."
New Scientist magazine - http://www.newscientist.com/inprint/index.jsp?id=20040605
More about Nicholas Negroponte:
Home page - http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/
MIT Media Lab Bio - http://www.media.mit.edu/people/bio_nicholas.html
Wired Magazine columns - http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/
MIT Media Lab home page - http://www.media.mit.edu/
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