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Feature creep: Plus ça change, plus ça change
May 31, 2006

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose--so goes the French saying, meaning, approximately, the a more thing changes, the more it stays the same. That may not continue to be true in our increasingly technological world. In fact, the more a thing evolves, the more it tends to lose touch with its original functionality. Or it becomes so complex that its once simple function becomes impossible to perform.

In "Nightmare of feature creep," the columnist Ellen Goodman describes a toothbrush (excuse me, tooth "cleaning system") that comes with a DVD. This, to Goodman, represents an unwelcome complexification of life, not to mention of the English language, in which complexification has been co-opted from its mathematical definition to describe things like, for example, a DVD-equipped toothbrush.

Goodman also calls to mind a cell phone that can take pictures, handle e-mail, tell time, get news, win at video games, and generally make its user feel incompetent. She writes, "It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon of a man going into a store asking, 'Do you have any phones that make phone calls?'"

And of course, cell phones aren't particularly good at calls. Wireless connections can be haphazard, and landline voice quality is typically far superior. It's not a stretch for the hypothetical New Yorker shopper to fear that the phone-calling function might disappear altogether from amidst the myriad other unrelated features.

So to my mind, the nightmare is not so much feature creep as original feature degradation.

Posted by Rick Nelson on May 31, 2006 | Comments (0)