Not two, three, four or five. My latest razor now has five blades – plus one on the back for trimming any recalcitrant hair. Our toilet paper is now three layers thick, has a space-age texture and is quite possibly made from Kevlar. Our toothpaste makes so many promises that our dentist can safely retire. And this is just the bathroom.
The western world is just about feature saturated. In the fight for our precious dollars, marketing departments need a never-ending supply of new, you-beaut features up their sleeves. Run out of ideas and they’ll be shown the door before they can say “now with added…”. No product line is immune: on everything from the dishwasher powder to the dishwasher itself, new features pop up like pimples on a teenager.
The age of technology has exacerbated this situation. When everything contains a microprocessor, the implementation of a new feature becomes a programming challenge, not a mechanical one. In the 21st century, adding a feature requires little more than an idea and a few lines of computer code.
In the world of software, so called ‘feature creep’ would be better called ‘feature sprint’. We – or at least those of us who are into these things – have become conditioned to expect an upgraded, more feature-rich version of all our software every few months.
The marketers love it. Every few months they get a whole new chance to refresh their brands, to buy advertising and, most importantly, to run launch events.
But it has made them lazy.
When having the best product boils down to having the longest list of bullet points, marketers no longer need to get into the mind of their markets. They stop looking to creatively solve their customers’ problems. They stop thinking outside the shiny shrink-wrapped box.
We, as consumers, don’t help the situation because we’ve always been easily seduced by bells, whistles and, more recently, ringtones. Design expert Donald Norman pointed out years ago that when we use products, we like them to be simple, but when we buy them we opt for all the extras we can get.
There are, however, early signs of change. Maybe, just maybe, the summit of this generation’s mountain of features is coming into view. Leading the climb, remarkably, are the predominant computer operating systems from Apple and Windows.
In the last month, Apple has broken a long software tradition by releasing a major upgrade that is not burdened with new features. The ‘Leopard’ version of the OS X environment has been taken to a health farm and come out, as ‘Snow Leopard’, leaner, fitter and, most notably, with no external makeover save a short-back-and-sides.
Later this year, Microsoft will release an upgrade of its operating system, Windows 7, with a similar emphasis. The current system, Vista, has been derided – and largely scorned – for its bloated size, prodigious appetite and fragile ego. Its replacement promises to be slimmer and much easier to get along with. Again, the emphasis is on utility over flamboyance.
2009 has been the breakthrough year for one of the most feature-less software applications in the park: Twitter. The announcement this week of a new, features-lite version of Facebook points to an interesting new battle for less rather than more. It is certainly another sign that there is still a place for vanilla in a chocolate-ripple-with-honeycomb-chunks world.
Next thing you know I’ll be trying to find single-blade Gillette safety razors again.
(Image 
rockmixer)
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I've been working in business, one way or another, for the last 20 years, and writing for the last ten. My main interest now is to get messages across - yours and mine - in a readable and approachable fashion. 
