Our industry lost one of its great minds this month when Niklaus Wirth passed at the age of 89.
One of his greatest contributions to our field seems eerily prescient now. It's an article called “A Plea for Lean Software” from Computer magazine back in 1995.
The article laments the fact that we have been conditioned with significant advances in hardware, leading to software that is unnecessarily bloated.
As an industry, he wrote, we have tendency to build a lot of features that no one really wants or needs.
And I'm echoing that plea today.
Uncontrolled software growth has also been accepted because customers have trouble distinguishing between essential features and those that are just “nice to have.”
I've been a software consultant for more than a decade -- and we see this all. the. time.
Software businesses that are bootstrapped or early stage have to focus maniacally on only building the features that are proven to be critical to adoption.
Then as adoption picks up, a second or third round of funding comes in, and these same businesses accelerate right out of the lean startup mindset.
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