Beta Stories — Episode 07
Notion launched in 2016 as a note-taking app with a clever block-based editor. By 2018, it had databases and project management. By 2023, AI. By 2024, a calendar. By 2025, an email client. 180 feature updates shipped in 2024 alone. The desktop app, an Electron wrapper, consumes 200 MB on disk. A note-taking app that now sends your email and manages your calendar. One does wonder when it will offer dental insurance.
This is the industry's favourite disease. And it has two symptoms that appear contradictory but share the same root cause.
Symptom One: Adding What Nobody Asked For
Jira was created in 2002 by two engineers in Sydney with a $10,000 credit card. A bug tracker. Simple, effective, named after Godzilla. Twenty-four years later, it serves Software Teams, DevOps, Product Managers, IT, HR, and Marketing through 3,000 marketplace plugins. Teams reportedly spend more time configuring their workflow tool than doing the work it tracks. Linear, which explicitly positions itself as "the anti-Jira," loads in about half the time. One does note the marketing angle with a certain sympathy.
Slack launched in February 2014 as a team chat application. By 2017, a single workspace consumed 130 MB to 960 MB of RAM. By 2019, users reported 5 GB consumption. The desktop app ran each workspace in its own Electron webview, complete with its own DOM state, JavaScript engine, and GPU resources. In 2019, Slack rebuilt the application, claiming 50% less memory. The application still consumes 200 to 500 MB on disk. For text messages.
Microsoft Teams consumed 5 to 6 GB of RAM in its Electron incarnation. The 2023 WebView2 rewrite claimed "2x faster, 50% less memory, 70% less disk space." Independent benchmarking confirmed the claims. Teams now idles at approximately 1 GB. Progress, certainly. Though one does note that "only 1 GB for a chat application" is a sentence that would have been considered satire in 2005.
Evernote may be the most instructive case. It launched as a simple note-taking application using 200 to 300 MB of RAM. Over the years, it added business card scanning, reminders, a presentation mode, a work chat feature, and, memorably, a marketplace selling branded backpacks and socks. The version 10 rewrite consumed over 1 GB with four notes open. The app fell from market dominance to near-irrelevance, overtaken by Notion (which is, of course, busy repeating the same trajectory at a higher velocity).
iTunes is the poster child. Apple's music player accumulated video playback, TV shows, podcasts, app management, ebook purchases, iPhone synchronisation, iCloud integration, a radio service, and social features. Apple killed it in 2019 with macOS Catalina, splitting it into three separate applications. The WWDC presentation was openly critical of the bloat. One does appreciate a company acknowledging its own mistakes, even if it took fourteen years.
Symptom Two: Removing What Everyone Used
Google has discontinued 299 products and services. Sixty apps. Two hundred and fourteen services. Twenty-five hardware products. The kill rate averaged twelve per year early on, rising to twenty-two per year between 2011 and 2021. 2019 was the bloodbath: over twenty-five products eliminated in a single year.
Google Reader, killed in July 2013, generated 100,000 petition signatures on Change.org within 48 hours, representing 24% of the platform's total traffic. Google proceeded regardless. Feedly gained 500,000 new users in 48 hours. The users were there. The will to serve them was not.
macOS Lion replaced "Save As" with "Duplicate" in 2011. Apple's support forums received hundreds of complaints per week. Users downgraded their operating systems. Apple partially reversed course in Mountain Lion, hiding "Save As" behind Option+Shift+Command+S. Four modifier keys to save a file. Progress.
Windows 11, released in October 2021, removed taskbar drag-and-drop, taskbar repositioning, icon ungrouping, small taskbar icons, and the full right-click context menu. A GitHub project providing a drag-and-drop workaround accumulated 1,500 stars and 173 forks. Microsoft restored partial drag-and-drop support in September 2022, nearly a full year later. Ungrouping returned in May 2023. Taskbar repositioning has not returned at all. The upgrade removed more than it added.
Reddit priced its API at $12,000 per 50 million requests in June 2023, translating to approximately $20 million per year for Apollo, a beloved third-party client with 1.5 million monthly active users. Apollo shut down on 30 June. So did Sync, BaconReader, and Reddit is Fun. Over 8,800 subreddits went dark in protest, representing a collective subscriber count of 2.8 billion. Reddit's CEO called the developer's objections "blackmail." The developer published audio recordings disproving the claim. Reddit proceeded regardless.
Firefox killed its entire XUL extension ecosystem with Firefox 57 in November 2017. Approximately 15,000 legacy extensions, 75% of all add-ons, became incompatible overnight. DownThemAll, Greasemonkey, Firebug, ScrapBook: gone. The browser lost 46 million users over the following three years, declining from 256 million in 2016 to below 200 million by 2020. Mozilla's rationale was sound (security, performance), but the execution was a masterclass in alienating your most loyal users.
Sonos redesigned its mobile application in May 2024, removing sleep timers, alarms, volume control, and accessibility options. The company's stock dropped 13%. Revenue declined 16% in fiscal Q4 2024. Approximately 100 employees were laid off. The CEO, Patrick Spence, resigned in January 2025. The company called the redesign "courageous." One does rather admire the vocabulary.
Skype, once the default for video calling with 405 million users in 2008, added Snapchat-style stories, flashy emoji themes, and colourful chat boxes in a 2017 redesign. App store ratings dropped from 3.5 to 1.5 stars. Usage declined to 36 million by 2023. Microsoft shut it down in May 2025, twenty-two years after launch. The features nobody wanted did not save it. The features everyone relied on were already gone.
The Mechanism
Adding features is how product managers justify the next sprint. Adding features is how startups justify the next funding round. Adding features is how enterprise sales closes the next contract ("Yes, we have that checkbox too"). The incentive structure rewards addition. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a feature count stable.
Removing features is how engineering teams reduce maintenance cost. Removing features is how companies push users toward newer, more profitable products (Google Reader died so Google+ could fail in peace). Removing features is how redesigns happen: strip the interface, call it "modern," ship it before anyone notices what is missing.
Neither decision involves asking the person using the software. The adding is driven by business metrics. The removing is driven by engineering metrics. The user is in neither equation.
The Signal
VLC has been a media player since 2001. No account required. No cloud sync. No AI assistant. No subscription. It plays everything, on every platform, and it has never once tried to send your email. The traffic cone icon has not changed. The feature set has barely changed. The software works. One does find this rather refreshing.
SQLite has maintained backwards compatibility since 2004 and runs on an estimated four billion devices. It did not achieve this by adding features every quarter. It achieved this by being finished. The file format has not changed in twenty-two years. The API is stable. The documentation is complete. The software does what it does, and it does not aspire to do more.
These are not legacy projects clinging to relevance. They are proof that restraint is a feature. The decision not to add a calendar, an email client, or a marketplace selling branded backpacks is itself a design decision, and it is the one that ages best.
Notion now sends your email. Skype added Snapchat stories and shut down eighteen months later. Google Reader served millions and was killed because it did not serve the company's social media ambitions. Windows 11 removed features that users relied on daily and spent two years putting some of them back.
One pattern adds until the product collapses under its own weight. The other removes until the users collapse under their frustration. Both end the same way: the user leaves.
The best software is not the one with the most features. It is the one that never added the wrong ones.
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By Vivian Voss — System Architect & Software Developer. Follow me on LinkedIn for daily technical writing.
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