Stop the software bloat: slim down your SaaS
Rarely in the history of software has a pile of code been as reviled as Clippy, the animated, googly-eyed paperclip Microsoft introduced in 1997, ostensibly to help users of Office. Time magazine dubbed it one of the world’s 50 worst inventions. The man who designed it boasted that his creation, at its peak, “was annoying hundreds of millions of people a day.” Even Microsoft itself ended up creating a self-mocking ad campaign around people’s frustration with this paperclip. So what was the problem with Clippy? To put it simply – he was bloated.
Bloatware, also often known as feature creep, is when successive versions of a program siphon ever-more memory and processing power, slowing everything down without any noticeable improvements.
Bloatware is as big a problem as ever, as ‘helpful’ software has migrated from the desktop to the phone and into the cloud and even software-as-a-service products. Bloated SaaS is particularly vexing, because these enterprise software packages were initially sold as a slimmed-down response to bloat. According to Gartner, “By 2023 organizations will overspend 750 million dollars on unused features of IT software.”
The time has come for the tech world to learn the lessons of Clippy, and cut out the bloatware.
How it started
In its earliest days, bloatware was limited largely to the bells and whistles that software companies added to their products to attract users. Microsoft’s Office 97, which spawned Clippy, contained 4,500 commands “for features both useful and arcane,” according to a 1996 Wall Street Journal article. The company finally stopped bundling Clippy with Office in 2007.
A second kind of bloatware also took hold during the PC era – software that arrived pre-installed on a machine because it represented an additional revenue stream for PC makers. Other times the bloatware came in the form of pre-installed ‘trialware.’ Any person on earth who has purchased a PC in the past two-plus decades has been hounded by pop-ups and come-ons from software security companies and others that invite users to try their product for a free-trial period.
Browser-based computing ushered in another form of bloatware in the form of all those extra toolbars and browser extensions that people unknowingly downloaded when they only meant to explore a website or install a legitimate app. With the smartphone came another whole universe of games and services and news and weather apps that no one asked for but that clogged valuable real estate on a small screen.
How it’s going
Bloatware has grown only more endemic, moving from targeting consumers to increasingly saddling businesses. Everyone is to blame and no one is. Engineers cook up clever new tricks and features and that becomes the rationale for adding another twist to a product rather than innovations users need. The salespeople need new features to show the world that a product is growing and improving, and then they upsell the latest release. Larger customers – those, not incidentally, with robust IT departments that could handle the inevitable problems with overly complex software programs – demand specialized features that are now part of the product everyone uses, resulting in customers paying higher prices for features they don’t need, want, or use.
Bloatware has grown only more endemic, moving from targeting consumers to increasingly saddling businesses. Everyone is to blame and no one is.
Maybe the biggest surprise is that the largest cloud software makers have followed the bad habits of the legacy software companies. In the 90s and early 2000s we watched as COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software) – aka ‘packaged applications’ – gained popularity as businesses tried to simplify and standardize their infrastructure. What they got was the opposite. Rather than solving the need to streamline efforts, these overloaded applications created more work, forcing businesses to change their own processes to adapt to whatever the tool supported. The pendulum shifted to best-of-breed SaaS tools, which were easy to deploy, but still allowed COTS to creep in. Products that were once user-friendly now require big IT departments to make them work. As far back as 2015, Forrester Research’s Kate Leggett was warning about feature creep. “Remember that more is not better; many times more is just more,” she wrote. But the bloat has continued unabated.
Bloatware, whatever the cause and in whatever form it takes, is more than a mere annoyance. The value proposition of SaaS was to move from an ownership model to a usage or consumption-based model. In an attempt to check off all the feature boxes, vendors have started paying lip service to the features, causing more angst for IT practitioners who don’t need the extra bells and whistles, but want to add value to the business quickly. This bloated software has left IT departments wasting time configuring, unconfiguring and extending pieces of ‘functionality’ that should have been configured correctly to begin with. These complicated, hard-to-manage packages and platforms interfere with an organization’s agility, leaving IT teams distracted from focusing on what they need to do. In addition to integration problems, bloatware clogs networks and drains processing power.
There are also security risks. Bloatware can expand a company’s attack surface, and an overly complex system is even harder to defend. It’s no surprise that data breaches are already on pace for a record year.
The fact that so many SaaS vendors are guilty of committing bloatware is especially ironic for those of us operating in this space. The original pitch for SaaS was a kind of anti-bloat premise: simple, easy-to-use tools that greatly lowered a company’s IT costs.
How to stop it
To keep bloatware at bay, IT practitioners should make app rationalization a frequent and regular activity to review all SaaS applications and evaluate whether to keep, rip and replace, or retire an app.
In the consumer world, utilities like PC Decrapifier and Should I Remove It have gained popularity as consumers look for ways to delete unwanted apps. In the business world, a newer crop of streamlined SaaS products has emerged in the past decade to help small and medium-size businesses that don’t have the IT budgets to deal with bloatware caused by feature creep.
To keep bloatware at bay, IT practitioners should make app rationalization a frequent and regular activity to review all SaaS applications and evaluate whether to keep, rip and replace, or retire an app. In fact, managing SaaS applications should become a key measure for IT, with a goal to have less. Another key measure to establish should be at the adoption of an application, to see whether it is being used, and if so, determining whether all features are being used as well. If the app is not being used, it should be decommissioned. If all features are not being used, it’s a candidate for rip and replace.
It’s time to kill the creep and learn our lesson from Clippy and other offenders of bloatware past. To stop the bloat, we must create software that cuts straight to the core of what users need – SaaS that is easy to customize, efficient to manage, and flexible to integrate. Now that Clippy is gone, we’re headed in the right direction.
Note: The above article was first published on eWeek.com.
