Software and the Great Gazoo Effect

Did you ever watch The Flintstones? What a great cartoon. I watched it all the time as a kid. The show really started off great. After a few seasons, though, things started slowly growing... It starts being a funny cartoon sitcom, nothing like any other show at the time. New characters emerged like Pebbles and Bam-Bam which were cute and added value to the show. Then, over time, unreal stories, more and more new characters and outlandish plots marred the show. The show just bloated itself into the sitcom graveyard.

The quintessential example of this bloat that killed The Flintstones is "The Great Gazoo". An alien from a futuristic world coming to prehistoric Bedrock, acting as a kind of evil influence on Fred and Barney. He gets them in all kinds of trouble as he seeks to build a dooms-day machine... What a load of crap. What a waste of a good show. Soon after the appearance of Mr. Gazoo, the show is canceled.

So many pieces of good commercial software have also suffered the Great Gazoo Effect. Tumbling into bloated heaps of features, unrecognizable from their former selves.

Jeff Atwood also provides great commentary on the subject.

I agree, over time, software can get bloated and overloaded with "features". I definitely have seen it happen but mostly on the commercial product side of our industry. It seems the user's cry for more features and the need to constantly crank-out more revenue from new versions compromises the product at some point, leaving it crippled.

I think a great example of this phenomenon is MS Office. Look at how it has grown over the years. Feature after feature until the UI was completely overhauled due to the abundance of features. Even with ribbon, some features are buried under a heap of their brothers and sisters, completely lost in obscurity.

Software can never be everything to everybody. Each application must have its sweet spot. The closer it sticks to that sweet spot, the longer its life. But, sometimes the spot sours and is no longer sweet. This is a critical point where the Great Gazoo can appear over an architect's shoulder, whispering and plotting a new dooms-day machine. Let's all find a way to tell him to get lost. We will explore ideas on how this can be done.