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> [1] It's 'good enough' for the majority of use cases. Some would argue that the lost features were cruft anyway. Which is fine unless you needed that cruft...

I don't like that "good enough" argument, because it misses the fact that features shape use patterns. Features are enablers.

To give a random example: I once visited my wife's office, and was given a task I could help them with while waiting. It was a task they did very frequently, and it boiled down to specifying a search query, and then adjusting some data in each of the result. They thought it'll keep me occupied for an hour or two, manually adjusting each of the hundreds of results, but I looked around the software and found a way to do a bulk update hidden somewhere in the UI, and was done in 3 minutes.

I taught the people in that office the trick and they were grateful, but it made me wonder - what if one day the software vendor removes bulk update switch because it's rarely used? It's only rarely used because it's not easily discoverable (but the telemetry will not tell you that). Wondering even further - how much money and opportunity to growth do companies lose on office tasks that are inefficient only because software was developed for the lowest common denominator, and offers no advanced features and no path to mastery?



Agreed and you give a perfect example of the type of feature that is often the first to go.




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