I’ve fallen to it myself, but mostly to the reverse version of it : not saying “this feature is obviously required” and then when learning that my favorite tool (shell, text editor, language, web browser, version control, whatever) doesn’t have it saying “oh but it’s useless”, but the reverse : someone tells me “you should try tool X, it has that great feature” and then I answer “I don’t see the point of that feature, it’s just that your tool X is bloatware, I’ll still to my tool Y” and when a later version of my tool Y implements the said feature I then switched and said to everyone “you should use tool Y, it has that great feature”.
It’s very similar (and since I became aware I’ve a tendency to this bias, I try to force myself to not fall to it again, but not totally successfully...) but it’s somehow more understandable : you very often see the point of a feature/tool/… once you started using it regularly in your own use cases.
I don’t think I did the direct version of it since the time where I was a teenager. At least, I hope I didn’t...
I’ve read that people only use small subsets of the available features in huge programs such as Microsoft Word, so it would seem like they should be able to get rid of “all those features nobody uses” and make a version without all that complicated bloat that confuses everyone. The problem, however, is that everyone uses a different subset of the feature set, so one person’s useless bloat is someone else’s essential, obvious feature that they don’t know how people would get along without.
“Features seem useless until you get used to them, at which point they become essential” may be a fairly common pattern...
I’ve fallen to it myself, but mostly to the reverse version of it : not saying “this feature is obviously required” and then when learning that my favorite tool (shell, text editor, language, web browser, version control, whatever) doesn’t have it saying “oh but it’s useless”, but the reverse : someone tells me “you should try tool X, it has that great feature” and then I answer “I don’t see the point of that feature, it’s just that your tool X is bloatware, I’ll still to my tool Y” and when a later version of my tool Y implements the said feature I then switched and said to everyone “you should use tool Y, it has that great feature”.
It’s very similar (and since I became aware I’ve a tendency to this bias, I try to force myself to not fall to it again, but not totally successfully...) but it’s somehow more understandable : you very often see the point of a feature/tool/… once you started using it regularly in your own use cases.
I don’t think I did the direct version of it since the time where I was a teenager. At least, I hope I didn’t...
I’ve read that people only use small subsets of the available features in huge programs such as Microsoft Word, so it would seem like they should be able to get rid of “all those features nobody uses” and make a version without all that complicated bloat that confuses everyone. The problem, however, is that everyone uses a different subset of the feature set, so one person’s useless bloat is someone else’s essential, obvious feature that they don’t know how people would get along without.
“Features seem useless until you get used to them, at which point they become essential” may be a fairly common pattern...